An Experience in Tir
Yasamin Ghalehnoie
- Period
- 2023
- Location
- Rabt Space and Darabad, Tehran
Project Overview
An Experience in Tir was a four-session collaborative writing workshop organized in July 2023 by Yasamin Ghalehnoie, in collaboration with Golnoush Heshmati and the independent venue Rabt Space. The workshop centered on speculative fiction, science fiction, and magical realism. Rather than focusing on professional text production or publishing goals, the sessions used group reading, walking, and collective imagination as a social practice of mutual accompaniment and simply being together.
The initial sessions took place inside the interior rooms of Rabt Space, while one session transitioned outdoors into the foothills of the Alborz Mountains in Darabad. Each gathering began with an open conversation detailing participants' personal experiences navigating life in Iran over the previous year, before moving into shared readings and slow walking exercises. The workshop concluded with the group co-creating a hand-made collective zine and an imaginative map.
Context & Site
The project intentionally balanced two contrasting environments: the enclosed, intimate interior of Rabt Space and the expansive natural landscape of Darabad. For Ghalehnoie, this spatial contrast was directly tied to altering one's perception of time and pace. Stepping out of urban interiors to walk through mountain trails offered a different way to experience time. Slow walking became a core group discipline, prompting participants to consider how shifting their physical pacing might influence their writing and creative output.
This approach aligns with the concept of crip time—a theoretical framework Ghalehnoie integrates into her practice to explore the lived experiences of chronic illness, disability, and varying physical capacities:
Rabt Space also managed public outreach and provided the physical workshop venue. This choice was deliberate: Ghalehnoie notes that self-organized, independent spaces possess a degree of flexibility and operational autonomy that makes them uniquely suited for collaborative, participatory work. These venues can adapt to the immediate emotional needs and urgent concerns of those who gather, a flexibility that directly manifests in their format, aesthetic choices, and distribution methods.
I think we speak less directly about this in contemporary Persian, even though the compounded pressures from every direction have placed us in daily contact with illness, surrounded by the language of medicine.
Participation & Process
The open call for the workshop was aimed broadly at anyone with a desire to gather and an interest in writing practices. No prior training or expertise in formal storytelling was required; the invitation relied entirely on shared interest, personal intimacy, and ease.
Day One: Began with introductions, checking in, and sharing personal reflections on living in Iran over the tumultuous prior year. The session transitioned into group readings of selected magical realist, speculative, and science-fiction texts.
Day Two: Involved collaborative exercises built around world-building, focusing on imagining unreached futures and alternative temporalities through conversation.
Day Three: A field trip to the Alborz mountain foothills in Darabad. The group engaged in slow, mindful walking to deliberately heighten sensory awareness of their natural surroundings.
Day Four: Focused on collaborative writing, mapping out narrative settings, and looking for themes of resistance, speculation, and mutual care within their texts. The session ended with the assembly of a hand-made zine and a shared map.
The participatory structure of the workshop ensured that all exercises were fully cooperative, depending completely on individual presence and group accompaniment. Rather than acting as a passive audience, participants dictated the actual rhythm and evolution of the sessions. The model of collective action used here encouraged collaborative experimentation, trial and error, and active community participation.
During the process, the group explored foundational questions regarding the purpose of gathering and the heavy institutional connotations of the word practice. They debated how their perception of the workshop space tied back to past experiences with rigid formal schooling, and what forms radical, alternative education might take.
The project intentionally avoided professional publishing or text-production benchmarks. The primary objective remained focused on community gathering, exploring relevant literature, and creative play. (In the summer of 2025, a follow-up collective re-reading session was organized in collaboration with Otagh-e Motalee'e, bringing members together in a different venue for an impassioned review of the experience.)
Motivations & Questions
The workshop proposal grew out of Ghalehnoie's personal desire to think through complex socio-political questions alongside a group of like-minded peers. The timing of the project was highly significant: held in the summer of 2023, it arrived during a period of widespread public exhaustion and social fragmentation, which the artist felt could be addressed through collective imagination and community gathering. The core prompt distributed to participants questioned how communities might build collective imagery through storytelling to envision alternative futures and re-narrate historical events.
Another dimension of the project involved working specifically in Persian, which the artist views as a loaded medium: for her, the Persian language is not a neutral tool, but a structure carrying deep traces of political, social, and economic pressures, while simultaneously possessing the capacity to subvert or reshape those same forces. This linguistic inquiry remains a central focus of her ongoing practice, particularly when engaging with writers and visual artists for whom text is an essential component of the work. Since completing this workshop, Ghalehnoie has deepened her involvement with independent zine communities and experimental text platforms. More broadly, she links this work to an alternative style of social practice designed to counter collective disillusionment:
For me the aim of social engagement isn't making striking or unusual work—its desires belong elsewhere, in the concerns of bodies, anxiety, the sense of not belonging, of loneliness and being on one's own.
Conditions & Negotiations
Ghalehnoie's relationship with institutional art spaces is multi-layered. In her experience, coordinating projects within commercial galleries or formal institutions involves complex administrative hurdles and gendered hierarchies that often dilute a group's core intentions or exacerbate social alienation. Choosing an independent, self-managed space like Rabt was a tactical decision to access alternative possibilities and highlight intersecting structural exclusions, rather than a compromise due to a lack of gallery access.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
Yasamin Ghalehnoie initiated the project in collaboration with Rabt Space and Golnoush Heshmati. Rabt Space provided the physical workspace and handled promotional outreach. The project operated entirely without institutional funding or corporate grants; hospitality costs were covered personally by the artist, and printing costs for the zines were shared among the participants.
Further Resources
About the Artist
Yasamin Ghalehnoie is an artist and researcher whose multi-faceted practice spans fine arts, traditional printmaking, and participatory community art initiatives. Her written texts, studio work, and collaborative workshops focus on social themes, including identity politics, the internal economics of the art world, and regional contemporary history.
Instagram: @qall
This entry was prepared based on documentation and texts provided by the artist.