An Equivalence of Our Distance
Golrokh Nafisi
- Period
- 2021
- Location
- Tehran, Rooberoo Mansion
Project Overview
An Equivalence of Our Distance was a participatory project that took place over three weeks in the post-lockdown winter of 2021 at Rooberoo Mansion (Emarat Roberoo), a mid-century mansion turned performing arts center in central Tehran. Initiated by Golrokh Nafisi in collaboration with six others, the project began with a letter sent to one hundred friends, relatives, and acquaintances, asking each of them to return a single piece of clothing, something old, worn, no longer in use. The clothes that arrived were photographed and numbered, then unstitched piece by piece by participants and passersby who came to the workshop over the course of three weeks. The unstitched fabrics were sewn back together into a single giant coat covering ninety square meters.
The project's central question grew out of the year of withholding that preceded it: how do absent bodies remain present through the objects that carried them, and how can a collective be made imaginable again, even before it can be gathered.
Context & Site
Emarat Roberoo is a performing arts center in central Tehran, near Valiasr Crossroads, set within a mid-century mansion at the end of a small alley. During the pandemic, with theater programs suspended, the building stood with little fixed function. The room used for the project was its "work and presentation room," a space normally reserved for talks and project presentations rather than performance, and one that had not at that time settled into any particular use among the people who came and went through the building.
Choosing this space was deliberate. Its informality made it usable simultaneously as a place of collective work, conversation, and performance, in ways that a gallery's protocols would not have permitted. As Nafisi has described, finding a host for projects of this kind in Tehran has typically been the harder half of the work; Emarat Roberoo agreed in this case because the theater's calendar had been emptied by the pandemic.
Participation & Process
The workspace was divided into three sections: registration, unstitching, and re-stitching.
Inviting participants happened on two registers. First, an organising group of five sent personal letters to one hundred friends, relatives, and acquaintances, twenty letters from each member of the team. The letter described the ten months since people had last embraced each other and asked the recipient to send a single piece of clothing that had reached the end of its life in their wardrobe. It ended with a line from Rumi: "I wish I was your garment, because you were curled up in its arms." Second, a shorter letter, risograph-printed on light paper, was distributed in the traditional way of street flyers at Valiasr Crossroads in central Tehran.
More than one hundred clothes were sent in. Each was photographed at the door in its final form as a complete piece, given an identification number, and added to a coat rack from which participants could select a garment and join the unstitching line.
The rule of the unstitching section was that scissors and cuts were forbidden; only seam rippers were allowed, taking each garment apart stitch by stitch. Participants wore masks and sat at distance from one another. Strangers found themselves working side by side for many days, returning to finish what they had started, talking, telling stories, sometimes singing along while their hands stayed busy.
Nafisi has reflected on what the Persian word for unstitching, شکافتن (shekāftan), carries:
In farsi, we use the word شکافتن which means to unstitch, to cleave, cut, incise, to rupture, to split, but also to untangle, unwind, to open a topic. So, the people who were engaging with the process of unstitching were at the same time undertaking an active role in the social dynamic of the space.
Approximately 110 garments were unstitched and their components re-sewn into the panels of a single very large coat. By the end of three weeks the combined fabric reached ninety square meters. The arrangement of the workspace then shifted again. Various musicians were invited to perform alongside the sound of the sewing machine in the middle of fabric rolls hanging from the ceiling, including an Azeri-speaking female singer and a group of Afghan musicians and singers. The remaining parts of the garments, including buttons and labels, were combined into the body and into the large button of the coat.
The final day was a public ceremony. The coat was passed out of the workshop through a window, carried by the audience, and lifted onto a tall hanger built in advance, with the load pulled up by a rope in a collective effort. A statement was read aloud, naming first the cities where the clothes had been manufactured (Vietnam, Bangladesh, Turkey) and then the Tehran neighborhoods from which the garments had come into the workshop (Karimkhan, Iranshahr, Behjat Abad). Initial photographs of each garment, taken at registration, were distributed among the crowd, and each visitor carried one of these photographs home.
Motivations & Questions
The project came together in the post-lockdown period from a longing for physical touch and from the question of what fills the apparent emptiness when others are not around. As Nafisi has put it: "There are objects that are present that materially fill up this apparently empty space in our absence."
Clothes, touched daily by the people they belong to and holding their warmth and smell, became the project's chosen vehicle for absence. The poem that accompanied the letter named the same intuition: in the absence of an embrace, the garment becomes the thing one would wish to be. The project's questions emerged in conversation among the team and in Nafisi's writing about the project afterwards:
Beneath the project's gentle form was also an argument about the conditions under which participatory work can happen in Tehran. As Nafisi has described, most of her proposals to galleries have not been accepted; what she has experienced in the Tehran art scene is a fear of involving the audience directly in making the work. A project of this kind needed a space that was neither a white cube nor governed by the gallery economy's question of saleability. Off-stage theater spaces, including her ongoing work with director Hamid Pourazari, have been where this kind of participation has been able to take place.
What is present in our absence, when we are not somewhere with somebody? What are the objects that can represent absence? When do we name a group of people a population? When do we recognise a group of people together as a society beyond their individual numbers? Can we revive these rites?
Conditions & Negotiations
The project had no production funding. All collaborators, including the artist, worked without payment. For the team, this distribution of costs across a number of very small sponsors, all of whom were also present in the workshop as participants, became a working model of how a project like this can be financed.
A further set of conditions sat outside the project itself. In Nafisi's experience, participatory projects in Tehran rarely find space in the city's visual arts institutions; the way around this has not been to find smaller galleries willing to take the work in, but to step out of the gallery system altogether and into spaces shaped by experimental theater. Emarat Roberoo became viable for An Equivalence of Our Distance specifically because its theater calendar had been emptied by COVID-19.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
The project was initiated by Golrokh Nafisi in collaboration with a core team of Ahmadali Kadivar, Ahmad Jafari, Maral Ashgevari, Parastou Sadeghi, Setareh Arashoo, and Ehsan Abdifar, who worked together on the design, organisation, and execution of the project across its three weeks. Emarat Roberoo hosted the work in its work and presentation room during the pandemic-emptied theater season. Kalar fabric shop donated the large lining fabric for the coat, and a maker of rings and brooches contributed financially to the courier service, scaffolding, and final music, also providing brooches that were incorporated into the coat's large button.
An Azeri-speaking female singer and a group of Afghan musicians performed alongside the sewing during the workshop, and three Qashqai folk musicians of naqareh and korna accompanied the coat-raising at the final ceremony. Beyond this core, more than one hundred people sent garments by post in response to the letter, becoming through that act part of the work; visitors and passersby at Emarat Roberoo came in to the workshop daily over the three weeks to take part in unstitching, talking, and re-stitching.
Re-reading
Further Resources
Golrokh Nafisi, "Ghad-e Faseleh", personal blog, 2021 (in Persian).
Golrokh Nafisi, Celebration of Distant Bodies, in conversation with Giulia Crispiani, NO NIIN, Issue 4, June 2021.
About the Artist
Golrokh Nafisi (born 1981, Isfahan) is an illustrator, puppet maker, and visual artist whose works are often influenced by the political and social events of the world around her. The direct participation of the audience in interacting with the artwork, and travel as an opportunity to create new calendars and maps, are two main axes in her artistic practice. Born in Isfahan, she holds a degree in Industrial Design from the Tehran University of Art and a degree in Fine Arts from the Rietveld Academie in the Netherlands.
Email: Golrokh@gmail.com
This entry was prepared based on materials shared by the artist.