سارا مظفری لرستانی
I was born in the summer of 1981 in Tehran, Iran. 1981 is two years after the Islamic Revolution of Iran, one year after the beginning of eight years of war between Iran and Iraq, and seven years before the mass executions of Iranian political prisoners. I was born in 1981 as a woman-to-be, and my body has become an extension of the country when I was 25 and traveled with me over the seas. I did not witness the Revolution, but its texture is projected on my body, on my mind. I grew up during the war, and my body carries the wreckage of those years. I do remember the mass executions of political prisoners, and my soul holds the trauma of hundreds of bullet holes, wears the bruised traces of nooses. Women's suppression, though, was the most profound way in which the texture of Revolution left its imprint on my body, and the boldest textures of spaces that resonate across my identity are the ones attached to my memories of womanhood.
In the tapestry of these tactile and spatial memories, my exhibition I Am There asks: How can one transcend boundaries through diasporic, feminine artistic expressions of trauma, body politics, and belonging? How can representations shaped by displacement and socio-spatial violence challenge dominant narratives while creating imaginative spaces for collective memory and affective orientation?
Deeply rooted in the soil of my lineage, my parents emerged from the rugged embrace of the Zagros Mountains, carrying whispers of Lorestan and Kurdistan in their tales. From these lands, my research unfurls, weaving tendrils of memory and inherited silence. This region holds the remnants of eight years of war between Iran and Iraq, layers of suppression, and landscapes etched with grief.
My installation is the first prototype of a larger project through which I aim to create an abstracted siah chador—the black tent traditionally woven by women from nomadic communities in Lorestan. The material I use, goat hair yarn, was sourced directly from elder women in the region through my aunt and carried overseas with the help of friends and family members. By adapting some of their weaving techniques while reimagining the form, I gesture toward an abstracted, temporary shelter, an architectural fragment rooted in tradition yet reaching toward speculation. Inspired by Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace, this structure inhabits a space between memory and imagination, geography and metaphor. The process has been slow, physical, and deeply instructional marked by friction, failure, repair, and care. In this iteration, my intention was not to complete the work, but to enter into a conversation with the material, with the form, and with the limits of my own body. It is a study in tension. A sketch in fiber. A gesture toward what this work might become.
Emerging within the piece are the paths of three rivers: Seymareh and Karkheh, flowing through the rugged terrains of the Zagros Mountains etched with oak forests, and Arvand Rood, tracing the border between Iran and Iraq. Their waters eventually converge, moving together toward the Persian Gulf. Along the way, they carry the layered histories of nomadic communities who have long lived near their banks. They are not passive coordinates, but spatio-temporal witnesses that carry the residues of violence and resistance. In their movement, memory circulates. I traced them using Google Maps, not to replicate topography, but to perform what David Pinder calls a dis-locative act: not a return, but a reorientation. As Sara Ahmed suggests, orientation is not about where one is, but how one turns, what one turns toward. The act of digital tracing became a method of reaching across distance, of moving toward what I cannot physically access. I take myself there through my mobile device, through the silent surveillance of satellite images, and through tracing their paths. In the spirit of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of speaking “nearby” rather than “about,” I do not attempt to recreate these rivers. I bring there into here.
This is not a finished work. It is an opening. Held together by tension, shaped by longing, and suspended in a state of becoming.
I am there.
