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Research and Book Arts

“TOXICOTOPIA” ZINE

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? Is it surprising that the city resembles the prison? Michel Foucault

Our cities are now prisons that suppress the body of citizens but If opposition against the pressure of the power class on the body, leads to production of an archive of mass audio, video and words that regardless of the causality of a historical event, tends to categorize, organize and isolate people according to race, religion and language, it will turn into a mechanical witness at service of cultural hegemony.

The artistic expression of this crushing oppression on the body, especially on body of Iranian women, must avoid changing into a production machine of eastern motifs and ambiguous elegies – that might be interesting for art galleries or western tourists –  in order to resist against the categorizing system of objectivity. Now in Iranian society, the body is the realm of valuation of power-dependent rituals, The pressure that mostly targets women and LGBTQ.

As Walter Benjamin said; For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Then how images, words, and sounds preserve, change, limit, or clear historical and social memory? How 70 years after the achievements of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran that brought social and political freedoms as part of the country’s laws, the subject of body restraint to be introduced to the world as a normal part of Iranian culture?

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