Same Roots: An Intergenerational Creative Dialogue

Project Overview

Same Roots was a participatory, theater-based project by Tamrin School that, in collaboration with a local NGO in Rasht, brought together mothers and their adolescent daughters in a process for intergenerational creative dialogue. Participants worked in two groups: mothers and daughters. Each group, in a relatively independent space, explored its experiences, questions, wishes, and conflicts using dialogue, letter-writing, drawing, narration, theatrical games, improvisation, and creative challenges. The two groups designed challenges for each other and read, analyzed, and turned the other group's responses into fresh material for continuing the process.

In the end, each group built a short performance for the other on the basis of the material produced. These two performances were not the final output but the turning point of the process and one of the main tools for the project's qualitative evaluation; a place where mothers and daughters came face to face with the image the other group had made of the relationship, expectations, and needs between them.

Context & Site

The project was carried out in a rented rehearsal studio (plato) in Rasht; a space that was neither a home, nor a school, nor a therapeutic environment, and for that reason could be a relatively neutral and informal territory in which participants could step back from their everyday roles. The scarcity of safe, informal spaces for intergenerational dialogue was an important social context for choosing such a place.

The project's space was divided into two parallel domains for the mothers and the daughters. This distance allowed each group to voice its questions, concerns, and wishes without the direct presence of the other group. The material produced moved between the two spaces through letters, challenge sheets, narration, and the facilitators; so the dialogue, before being face-to-face, was back-and-forth and mediated. In the stage of performing the two works, this temporary distance gave way to a shared space in which each group encountered a representation of the relationship from the other group's perspective. As a result, the space was not merely a container for activity; separation, exchange, and then reunion formed an important part of the design of participation.

Motivations & Questions

Same Roots grew out of attention to the distance between mothers and adolescent daughters in the possibility of speaking, being heard, and making decisions. In the project's account, in many family relationships, dialogue is shaped by fixed roles, upbringing-related expectations, and inequality in authority and responsibility, and discussions revert to repetitive patterns of advice, defense, silence, or conflict. The project sought to build an artistic, indirect framework in which both groups, before a direct encounter, could translate their experiences, fears, wishes, and their imagining of the future into letters, images, narration, and performance. The central issue was not the elimination of conflict or the teaching of a single model of relationship, but the practice of listening, questioning, mutual recognition, and negotiation about the relationship. Along the same lines, a further question was also raised:

Can artistic creation play a part in redistributing agency, creating mutual care, and bringing about even small changes in family relationships?

The social and cultural structures of the family had the most direct effect on the project's formation: age hierarchy, gendered expectations of the roles of mother and daughter, and the concentration of authority in the hands of adults. The daughters' imagining of the future was also bound up with subjects such as education, employment, independence, marriage, migration, and economic constraints, and the participants' social class was not without effect either. The project did not assume the mother-daughter relationship to be symmetrical, and turned the real inequality of power between them into a subject of observation and dialogue in itself.

Conditions & Negotiations

The project's most important obstacles were not official censorship but the continuity and quality of participation. The lateness or absence of some individuals, changes in the group's composition, the limited time of sessions, and the difficulty of carrying out some activities in the interval between sessions put pressure on the continuity of the process. Protecting privacy was also a specific challenge: even in the anonymous exchange of letters, the closeness of the family relationship could lead to the recognition of handwriting or of the writer's experience.

In response, the temporary separation of the mothers' and daughters' groups, as the main strategy, provided relatively greater safety for expressing experiences, and the use of letters, images, narration, and theatrical character made it possible to raise sensitive matters without the requirement of direct disclosure. Rather than a wholly fixed program, the team adjusted the schedule and activities to the state of the group, and drew on supervision, report-writing, and post-session reflection to examine its own decisions and assumptions. The two closing performances were at once a tool of dialogue and of evaluation: the selection of material, the manner of representing the relationship, and the opposite group's reaction helped the team gauge the distance between the initial aims and the participants' experience.

Documentation

Collaborators & Support

The project was realized through a collaboration between Tamrin School and a local NGO in Rasht. Tamrin School was the project's designer and executor, with curation and overall design of the project by Navid Ghavidel; Malahat Madani and Faezeh Lotfi collaborated as the NGO's representatives in executive coordination and documentation of the process, and Nastaran Ghavidel and Mehdi Rostami took on the direct facilitation of the groups.

The local NGO covered the executive costs, including the rent of the plateau, stationery, refreshments, and participants' transportation; covering transportation costs in particular reduced part of the economic obstacles to attendance. The designer and facilitators worked voluntarily and without pay; a model that made the project possible but was fragile for long-term continuity.

About the Artist

Tamrin School is an independent artistic, educational, and research collective working at the intersection of artistic practice, pedagogy, and situated research. Using participatory and collective methods, the collective examines how people learn, relate to one another, remember, and imagine different possibilities of collective life. Through workshops, long-term participatory processes, collective writing, performative experiences, and the building of shared archives, Tamrin School brings together people of different backgrounds. In this approach, art is understood, before being merely a tool for producing cultural products, as a method for research, dialogue, reflection, and the practice of social relations. The collective attends in particular to practices that arise from lived experience and from contexts affected by inequality, displacement, gendered power relations, and everyday negotiation. In Tamrin School's projects, documentation, reflection, and collective analysis are part of the process itself, and practice is understood as a way of producing embodied, dialogic, experiential, and shared knowledge.

@tamrinschool