Between Currents
Stretching 950 kilometres from Kuhrang to Abadan, the Karun River has only made its way into my life through language: sonic, visual, and musical. It's around 5,000 kilometres away from me, and I'm trying to find my way closer to it.
Then there is the Maas, also stretching 950 kilometres, through the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. I've been so close to it that I've listened to its inner depth through contact microphones, yet it doesn't manifest in any language in my mind, maybe only sonic, in a way that could resemble any waterway.
How do these paths resemble each other? How do they connect? And where do I stand between them?
Through satellite images, one can connect to such vast places, to understand where they stand and sway. But what do these images represent? And what is our position in witnessing them?
“Ecological witnessing requires the viewer of the satellite image to exist both in the image (situated and as part of the ecological body captured by the image) and beyond it (as a living human being looking at the image) closed because the image ecology exists both within and without the human. The ecological witness is viewer and subject, constituent and active participant.” (Brown, 37)
The shapes, the disconnections, the names and language used in each image resonate with their habitat, yet in heavily politically controlled ways. When repeated, they can bring new connections; rather than standing as something rigid and unchanging, they become something else, like new traces of each other.
I started listening, while drawing from the curves of these unknown traces on printed satellite images, to sounds and footage randomly found online. Karun first manifested itself in a bombardment of videos about how, during the 40-day war on Iran that began in February 2026, the rain had revived the dams and streams of the river. Only after a short while, the darker, contaminated realities of Karun made their way out, amplified through the voices of people from the area, witnessing the sewage system failing and spilling into the river's stream. Again and again these scenes repeated.
The fluidity of the bodies put into the stream, becoming one with the river, in the most destructive way, until I came across a video of a couple who had died by suicide in the river. Locals found their floating bodies, which became like stones, floating and rumbling the water, while the sobbing and mourning of the men who found and filmed them could be heard.
The sound of the river I listened to is not the sound one is used to hearing, not the sound it's meant to carry, but the fluidity and the bodies it carries that it's not meant to, and the silence of the bodies so far from it, that they cannot hear each other.
Finding the "Khāneh" in "Roud-Khāneh"
This is a work, or a life, in process: finding the khāneh — home, in Farsi. I decided to move away from the inner sounds and sonic works revolving around the building I grew up in, in Tehran, and found myself wondering how rivers might connect me from Rotterdam to Tehran. That was the first spark: to find the khāneh in the roud-khāneh (river).
At the Nature of Rotterdam residency, I began looking for visual translations of the project. The NoR garden became a research space, a place to find sounds unheard through contact mics, merged with sounds far from me, shared by companions from Iran living in spaces similar to the garden. Reconnecting with them after a long-distance experience of the recent war, I reconnected both with my own listening, and with theirs.
Working with satellite images, drawing, and ceramic, the drawings and clay works follow a repetitive method: recording, drawing while listening to that recording, then recording the act of drawing itself, and drawing again from that, finding what gets lost, and what also becomes and appears through these repetitions.
I listened to frogs and crickets I didn't know existed. Reaching into the pond, we heard sharp, glittering, low, and frequent sounds, close to an electrical frequency, joining with the louder calls of the frogs. Mixed and layered, these unseen sounds let me imagine that hearing the garden sounds my father sends me, and his voice while I draw, is really him just outside the door, telling the shepherd's son not to let the dog in, so the chicks stay safe. Or the sound of my friend and colleague Maryam, walking her dog in a circle, sharing with me what her surroundings are like now.
And so the sounds of myself listening to a multilayered sonic past and present are recorded again and again, while I listen to these collages of space and time joined together in my studio, and think: how is my time passing? How does time change its meaning when political stigma and propaganda use the pathways of straits and waters to freeze time, to hold hostage the lives of our loved ones?
Perhaps it's not finding the khāneh, but finding the traces of how it's become manipulated, interrupted, and misused for something so far from it. The Maas is forced to become a perfect home, with controlled sounds and subtle lakes; Karun is suffocating from debris and cruelty, giving up itself for the bettering of other people's lives. Yet the join is one image, in one state, a satellite imagery looking so silent that you might not notice if anything is wrong or missing.
Brown, Imani Jacqueline. "Ecological Witnessing." Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art and Art-Based Research, edited by Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale, and Polly Stanton, Onomatopee, 2022.
Supported by CBK Rotterdam
(Centre for Visual Arts Rotterdam).
This project is made possible through
financial support from the Mondriaan Fund.