Pages #2 - Play & Locations

What makes a place different is first of all it’s setting or its mise-en-scène ,that is, the orientations it implies and the subjectivities it entails. Often however, a place thought of in these terms, is translated into a location from where stories are transmitted, or transposed into a localewith a recating of its inhabitants’ roles into re-enactments of the play of the space they inhabit. Transpositions ca develope into strategies of applying changes to places. These changes do not necessarily have to be physical to be real.

The idea of moving Iran’s capital has been under discussion since 1989, due to Tehran’s heavy pollution and overcrowding, but most of all due to the risk of an earthquake. Tehran lies on a major seismological fault and experts have long warned that a strong earthquake in the city would be devastating. Numerous faults crisscross the city. The hazard of the city is known, but to predict the time of the earthquake remains, as always, impossible. It is believed that it takes 20 to 30 years to gradually move the population out of the capital.

The withdrawal of the governing force from Tehran as the first (and possibly the last) steps in moving the capital would not only undermine the city’s geopolitical role on the national and international level, but even the social, economicaland urban structure of the city will be destabilized. But more than anything this idea of moving the capital carries with itself, as a safety measure, the notion of abandonment, an escape from the predicted disaster that may one day take us for surprise.

The citizens of Tehran are faced with a double-edged anticipation: the predicted catastrophe and its proposed preventive measure, the moving of the capital. They both lack any political, economical and scientific backing for the time and nature of their occurrence. This has developed the abstract notion of predictions (that of the quake), and the fantasy of prevention (in terms of the moving of the capital) into an ever-returning dialectics that is evoked whenever reality comes too close.

The anticipation of the moving of the city of Tehran is maybe closer to reality than the catastrophe that is being predicted for more than 20 years. But this is nothing new. Any preventive measure for a predicted catastrophe is meant to take place way before it is too late. The occupation of Iraq by the allies was also a preventive measure to “safeguard the world” from a predicted nuclear catastrophe. What happened was in the end the opposite: the prevention became the actual catastrophe; the anxiety of a catastrophe is often taken as a pretext for the safeguarding and the reestablishment of positions and ideologies.

Articles:
/ Play and Location- Editorial
/ A city built by its inhabitants
Arash Mazafari
/ Looking For a Missing Employee
Rabih Mroué
/ The phenomenon of disappearance- Looking For a Missing Employee by Rabih Mroue
Pierre Abi Saab
/ Nothing Will Ever Happen Here, Nothing Has Ever Happened
Arta group, Sahar Dowlatshahi, Fouad mokhbery
/ The Strait or a Life Full of Holes
Yto Barada
/ The Case of two American Embassies in Berlin and Tehran
Vesta Nele Zareh
/ An Eclipse, Which Dropped From The Sky
Maani Petgar
/ Diagram and Rhizome
Mohammad Hassan Malekpour, Gelayol Mosaed



مجله صفحه ۲
بازی و مکان

گاهنامه دوزبانه
فرهنگ و هنر
اردیبهشت ۱۳۸۳

متن‌ها:
/ بازی و مکان
بابک افراسیابی، نسرین طباطبایی
/ شهرى كه مردمانش آن را ساخته اند
آرش مظفرى
/ مصاحبه با استیو مک کویین
بابک افراسیابی، نسرین طباطبایی
/ تنگه
ییتو بارادا
/ درجستجوی کارمند گم شده
ربیع مروه
/ پدیده ناپدید شدن- پرفورمنس درجستجوی کارمند گمشده از ربیع مروه
پیر ابی‌صعب
/ اینجا هیچ اتفاقی نخواهد افتاد، اینجا اتفاقی نیفتاده است
گروه آرتا، سحر دولتشاهی، فواد مخبری
/ تنگه یا زندگی پر دردسر
ییتو بارادا
/ سرگذشت دو سفارت‌خانه‌ى آمريكا در برلين و تهران
وستانله زارع
/ کسوفی که از آسمان به زمین افتاد
مانی پتگر
/ نوشته و تصویر
محمد‌حسن ملک‌پور، گلایل مساعد