Workers Don't Go to the Factory
A collective of artists and social activists
- Period
- 2018
- Location
- Shahamati alley, Deh-Vanak, Tehran
Project Overview
Workers Don't Go to the Factory is a collective narrative of the history, everyday life, and resistance of the residents of the Deh Vanak neighborhood against official trends of demolition, appropriation, and Gentrification-Induced Displacement. This project was formed on December 9, 2018, in collaboration with a group of artists, social activists, and neighborhood residents, and was realised in the urban space Deh Vanak neighborhood. The event included a collection of photographs, photo-collages, installations, local maps, video art, musical performances using found objects from the demolished houses, and an open tribune.
The exhibition was held against the backdrop of an active and escalating dispute over the demolition of the workers' houses in the area, and was framed as a collective narrative of the history, life, and resistance of the residents in the face of urban displacement.
Context & Site
The site of the exhibition was in Shahmati Alley in Deh-Vanak, a neighbourhood whose history stretches back to 1938, when Factory No. 5 of Vanak was established and a group of workers was housed in organisational dwellings nearby. With the factory manager's agreement, the workers expanded their homes over time, and their families remained in the area generation after generation. The factory itself was later relocated, but the community stayed. In the decades that followed, the surrounding landscape changed. The Higher School for Girls — later renamed Al-Zahra University — was founded in 1964 on land that had previously been a cemetery. In 2003, when the building of the Railway Higher Education Centre (the former Factory No. 5) was annexed to the university as part of a development plan, the registration plates of the workers' organisational houses and the factory were treated as one, and a dispute between the residents and the university began. The conflict has continued since the mid-2000s. In the summer of 2018, the university abruptly demolished several houses with bulldozers, and residents began to make their situation public through media and through contact with urban activists. The exhibition emerged within this moment.
Participation & Process
In the project Workers Don't Go to the Factory, the neighborhood residents simultaneously played the roles of audience and creators, and actively participated in various stages of the work. The work was built outward from the homes themselves. Artists and activists after visiting and being in conversation with the residents a few times, went to the houses of Deh-Vanak residents, spoke with them, and explained the idea of the exhibition. Photographs, personal objects, and items carrying the memory of their lives in the neighbourhood enriched the archival material of the exhibition idea.
A portion of the works emerged directly from the rubble. Objects retrieved from the demolished houses were used as raw material: a musical performance was made from dishes and items left behind in the ruins; photographs of residents were installed on the local walls; collective readings and conversations took place in the same space. The exhibition itself opened onto a free tribune, and visitors who walked into the Shahamati dead-end alley encountered the installations, photographs, and videos directly, often in face-to-face conversation with the residents themselves.
The line between audience and participant did not hold inside the project. The residents were simultaneously subjects, narrators, and viewers of the work. Visitors from outside the neighbourhood — many of them students, some from other parts of the city — entered into the same shared space.
Motivations & Questions
The exhibition took shape in response to the escalating demolition of houses in the area, and within the long-running dispute over the ownership of the workers' houses of this part of Deh-Vanak. The motivation, as articulated in the project materials, was to address a dimension of the situation that public attention was not focused on:
The exhibition tried to convey its narrative through creative artistic tools, without turning into a slogan or a direct political position. The main strategy of the project was living in the moment, the temporary occupation of space, and the creation of indirect discourse through artistic form.
At that moment, public attention was mostly focused on the material dimension of land and property. A group of artists and activists decided to address another aspect of the matter: the human, psychological, and identity dimension of this neighbourhood and its residents. The aim became to depict the lived experience of the local residents with a critical yet empathetic gaze. For this reason, the process was not merely the documentation of an urban event, but an attempt to revive collective memory and to show the symbolic value of the home as shelter, memory, and identity.
Conditions & Negotiations
The project was fully independent and was carried out without any form of institutional or financial backing. The artists and activists relied on their own resources and on the collective solidarity of the residents, who supplied catering, materials, and refreshments; the projector and the rest of the execution equipment were assembled through friendship networks. Shortly after the exhibition began, police and security forces arrived at the site and pressed to disperse the gathering.
Other reactions surfaced over the course of the day. Debates emerged around clothing, the behaviour of the women present, and the philosophical references in some of the works (including an invocation of Nietzsche) — registering a cultural and intellectual gap between different groups inside the neighbourhood and the participating artists. According to some residents, the local community divided into two camps in the immediate aftermath. Al-Zahra University announced afterwards that it intended to file a legal complaint, on the grounds that the land where the exhibition took place was university property.
Documentation
Collaborators & Support
The project was developed and carried out by a collective of artists and social activists in collaboration with residents of the Workers' Quarter of Deh-Vanak; no individual curator, named collaborators, or participating institutions are listed in the project materials. There was no official financial support and no production budget; catering and a portion of the on-site facilities were provided by the residents themselves, and the rest came together through informal lending.
Further Resources
[in Farsi:]
Shervin Taheri, "Art Outside the Gallery: A Look at the Collective Artistic Participation of Artists in Defense of the Right to Housing named 'Workers Don't Go to the Factory' in the Deh Vanak Neighborhood", Tandis, Issue 380, January 1, 2019.
IRNA 24 Report
"Other City" (Shahr-e Digar) Report: http://shahredigar.ir/expropriation-mapping
Amir Yaghoubali, "A University That Is Not a University", Meydan
Atefeh Rangriz and Hamzeh Alipayam, "Shelter is Our Right", Meydan
Majid Ebrahimpour, "Deh Vanak: A Collective Issue for the Right to Life", Meydan
Mahsa Asadollahnejad, "Deh-Vanak and the State," Modakhele.
Amirali Ghasemi, "The Epic of Deh-Vanak on an Autumn Evening," Sarkhoshi.
About the Artist
Workers Don't Go to the Factory was a collective project carried out by a group of artists and social activists together with the residents of the Workers' Quarter of Deh-Vanak. Individual names are not attributed in the project materials.
This entry was prepared based on a conversation with locals, together with existing resources.
This entry was prepared based on the artist's account and accompanying project materials, and edited in collaboration with the artist.