from the series: Un/tracing Empire: Pollinations between the Poetic and Ethnographic
No wings to Fly to God, premiered at SoundPedro in Los Angeles, June 3rd and then went on to Ohrenhoch Gallery in Berlin for July and August, 2022 and is now in its permanent home at Cultural anthropology.
Tehran Tourist A film by Roxanne Varzi
In her second experimental documentary, Anthropologist Roxanne Varzi travels back again to Tehran. This time she decides that the best way to see a place with a multitude of preconceived notions attached to it is through the eyes of a child. An ode to Abbas Kiarostami who deftly showed us the world through the eyes of a child, Tehran Tourist is a project in guerrilla filmmaking. The film was shot predominantly on an iPhone, hand held and on the fly. It moves from the Archeology museum in Tehran to a village in Kurdistan (soon-after devastated by an earthquake) to playgrounds and school rooms — in and out of political landscapes and allegory to elucidate an Iran that very few are privy to. The film plays with youthful notions of identity and place and belonging as a child tries to make sense of where he is and where he came from. All the while, it introduces the non-Iranian viewer to an Iran that very few are privy to.
Plastic Flowers Never Die
Title Plastic Flowers Never Die
Duration 34 minutes
Language English and Persian with English subtitles
Format Color Video
Date 2008
Subject The cultural aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988
Music by
Distributed by
Documentary Educational Resources [Link] [TRAILER]
The war with Iraq was the largest mobilization of the Iranian population, achieved primarily by producing and promoting a culture of martyrdom based on religious themes found in Shi’a Islam. Martyrdom became state policy. Khomeini made it clear the war was a spiritual one that the people, and not a professional army, would fight. It would be a sacred defense; a war of good against evil, of spirit against military might, where a human wave of believers would form a wall of defense against the Iraqis. Over 800,000 people died.
Anthropologist, writer and filmmaker Roxanne Varzi spent twelve years researching and writing about post-Revolution public culture in Iran. As an Iranian-American who was born in Iran and left shortly after the Revolution, she found that even though she had missed the war with Iraq, it remained omnipresent. She spent a year in Iran without a film permit speaking to ideologically driven mural painters, museum curators, war vets, and other cultural producers alongside the secular youth who were meant to consume the culture created by the government. The result is an experimental documentary and meditation on the aftermath of the war, and especially the mourning after.
Installations: Sound and Video
The Whole World Blind
Much of my teaching and research centers on visuality and war. Virginia Woolf, who influenced Susan Sontag, reminds us that showing images of war reinscribes their violence. And so to produce my findings on war photography, based on years of museum research, I made a sound project The Whole World Blind — which disrupts the power relation between the watcher and the watched.
Whole World Blind premiered at Soundwalk Long Beach, went to Berlin Germany and then to Philadelphia and is now at its permanent home at Public Books.
SoundCloud – The Whole World Blind
Salton Sublime
After premiering at Soundwalk in Long Beach, CA, it went to Berlin which caught the attention of Ohrenhoch Gallery who invited me to make another piece. Concerned with the climate crisis in my own backyard, I featured the Salton Sea.
Salton Sublime meditates on the religious idea of the sublime – which incorporates nature’s awe-inspiring beauty and its danger (in this case massive environmental degradation) by juxtaposing its beauty with its extreme toxicity.