ADMA 2025-2026

How can we reclaim the represented political and historical narratives by engaging with archive and memory.

This research emerges from realizing how my understanding of certain socio-political events was deeply shaped by the state narrative I grew up with and was educated in as an Iranian. This gap became more apparent after I moved to Belgium four years ago and experienced viewing major geopolitical events in Southwest Asia through a North-West European lense. The Iran–Iraq War, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the ongoing occupation of Palestine are events I first learned about through state-controlled discourse. One example is a school lesson at age eight, titled “A Letter from a Palestinian Child.” Looking back, I see how information was presented to us from an early age and make us take sides. Since supporting Palestine aligned with the state’s stance, as a kid I believed I should not support it.

In this context, the power structure is not just taking over the images, but also it owns the language of resistance, using the vocabularies like martyred, sacrificing, motherland etc, and takes over the whole narrative. In my artistic practice, I work with personal archival material, exploring memory, rememberance, time and intimacy through moving image and text.

This artistic research seeks to re-read some of these socio-political events I have witnessed and expand my material using interviews, found footage and essays to deconstruct the oral and written (hi)stories that have shaped me.

Methodologically, I would like to experiment with real time composition – a concept-tool designed and developed initially by choreographer João Fiadeiro – which proposes “stopping” and “stopping twice”:

Real Time Composition proposes a simple paradigm shift: instead of reacting based on previous  knowledge one should suspend knowledge. Instead of fighting the unknown (or surrender to it) one should welcome it. As a result the linear experience of time is interrupted, a gap in the sensation of continuity is produced and an interval “emerges”. Inside this interval, time is not linear (or even circular) but “twisted” (like the topological surface of a “Mobius strip”) (Fiadeiro, n.d.)1

I believe that this approach can provide tools to play with, re-arrange, re-act to, or take a position toward specific events, allowing me to examine the role of memory in the formation of history. I want to resonate with concepts like potential history, counter-narrative and possible world theory to study and research how realities and histories are created in different social-political contexts. The preferred outcome of this artistic research will be frameworks to share my research in the context of a video installation, accompanied by texual material produced or collected during my research.

A tulip, dove, and a sign from an unknown martyr: a statue in a public area in Tehran, photo taken on September 2025

1- Fiadeiro, J. (n.d.). Real Time Composition: Introduction. João Fiadeiro. from https://joaofiadeiro.pt/real-time-composition/introduction/