Recycled Tehran

Recycled Tehran (2016) is a single-channel digital video from my ongoing Recycled Series Project in which I degenerated the stills from footage shot by a mobile phone with a copy machine. The original footage shows urban scenes in a gentrified neighbourhood in Tehran. The voice-over narration reveals an account of a middle-aged man who revisits the area. While recording with his mobile phone camera, he describes the changes he observes in the neighbourhood where he had lived in the past. The observations are combined with the narrator’s personal recollections that encourages the audience to (re)imagine the places, images of which are simultaneously being degenerated and erased in the video. The degenerated images play a game of doubles with the subject of ruins. On the one hand, we see the images of actual places/sites that have been lost through urban development; on the other hand, we encounter the artificial ruins that the copier generates. These virtual ruins are images whose representational characters are disrupted. In this sense, Recycled Tehran is made with the ruined archives of archival ruins.

© Maryam Muliaee, 2016