Thesis, 2021 2~ a Play for Public Vida Kasaei Keywords: Reality, Fiction, Public Domain, Storytelling

Thesis, 2021 2~ A Play for Public Vida Kasaei Keywords: Reality, fiction, public domain, storytelling 4~ Reality and truth always have the seal of human cognition on their forehead and find their expression in the form of human language. This cognition is not too troublesome and does not pose a problem in its understanding of subjects, but when confronted with the passage of time, the matter changes and puts our relationship with time ahead. With this interpretation, reality is based on a trembling understanding and, with the rise of modern financialized metropolises—in which society is changing so rapidly— our understanding is on a rollercoaster ride. The major focus of this study is the ambiguity of truth, that has been changing in both the physical and virtual public domains of economized cities, and its relationship to literature and visual language. Our current truths are mainly shaped by advertisement engines exploiting all kinds of art in the public domain through mainstreaming counterculture to pursue their economic aims. By studying the history of the creation of public opinion and the public domain from the perspective of a storyteller, these themes are explored and turned inside-out through an exotic safari of thoughts, encountering a wide range of philosophers, artists, filmmakers, photographers, and journalists. Although the role of stories in our lives has become problematic due to external advertisement narratives, the world of storytelling, art and literature can present a worldview that closely corresponds to our experience of reality; nevertheless, we know that their basis is fictive. Reality has never been perceivable without fictional stories that stem from truths. Therefore, the work of art in our current age of information should reflect, criticize, disrupt, but also consciously allowing fiction as a form of possibility to transform imagination. 6~ i. Abstract ~xx 1. Prologue ~xx 2. Introduction: Crisis of Truth ~xx 3. Creation of Metropolis ~xx 3.1.Public and Private Space ~xx 3.2.Flow of Truth ~xx 4. Information City: Storytelling versus Information ~xx 5. Visual Storytelling ~xx 5.1 Artistic Oeuvre of Newsha Tavakolian ~xx 6. A Reflective Round-Up References ~xx 1 (see Wikipedia contributors “Women’s Rights in Iran”) 2 (see Wikipedia contributors “Iranian Reformists”) 8~ 3 (see Wikipedia contributors “Iranian Green Movement”) As a Millennial—who, according to the Pew Research Centre (Heimlich), are counterculture junkies and the largest consumer generation (Okomo)—growing up in a liberal middle-class family within the oppressed culture of post-revolution Iran governed by highly sensitive Islamic rules, shaping a countercultural identity for myself was not an inconceivable pathway. After the revolution in February 1979, the country came under an Islamic structure and the public domains were re-shaped based on Islamic ideologies and standards. The most oppressive of these rules have been the restrictions for women. For instance, all women in Iran (local or tourist) are obligated to wear a hijab (an Islamic term for an item of clothing for covering women‘s hair and body protrusions in public spaces). Also, women are not allowed to sing solo in public 1. These are rules which had a direct influence on me as a young girl growing up in a patriarchal culture. In the late 1990s, as a result of globalization, change was inevitable. In 1997,2 after twenty years of a country lead by hard-liners, people voted for a reformist president. At this time, I was stepping into my second decade of life. The reformist wave brought a more liberal spirit into most houses and to people who sought change. However, the movement, except for giving a tiny bit more freedom to people, did not bring any fundamental changes. In May 2009, when I was in my early twenties and studying interior design, there were uprisings of millions of people in different cities against the results of the presidential election (which is known to the world as the Green movement).3 In this era, I was at the highest point of rebelliousness against all the social and political norms which were forced upon my life. The events in 2009 caused gripping changes for Iranian youth. As a result, many people in my generation were in jail, imprisoned in their homes, or had left the country due to the political circumstances. I was one of the people who had to leave the country after a while. Arriving in the Netherlands opened a new chapter in my life. Although I had been to Europe before, I had never lived in any Western country before 2011. At that time, Europe and Western countries were healing from the financial crisis of 2008. Neoliberalism was gaining the 4 All Ashoori quotations are translated into English from Persian/Farsi by myself. 10~ 5 Interview with Newsha Tavakolian conducted by me on 3rd December 2020. power to reshape cities and the flow of the economy on a global scale. Since, in Iran, the public domain is ruled by its government’s conservative ideologies, I was curious to discover how the public domain was formed in a Western country, such as the Netherlands, and how it influences public opinion. As liberal as it seems, it is nevertheless tainted with political and economic systems pursuing their own objectives. This is where, in dealing with modern thought, I am caught in ambiguity and bottlenecks. There was no way out of the bottlenecks without understanding how the public domain has been established. Literature and art, which can be traced back to the establishment of the first civilizations, are the sources by which I could (to a certain degree) grasp how the public domain of today is shaping our reality and the truths we believe in. Poetry mainly in the East, and philosophy in the West, were and are the main sources through which to do human studies. As an Iranian/ Dutch person, considering my Persian poetry and storytelling roots, I am intuitively interested in poetic language and experience. The Iranian thinker and author Dariush Ashoori (1938), in his book Poetry and Thought (1994), believes in the function of poetry for changing attitudes towards the world and that the function of poetry, in this sense, is to review the world and change it, to create and innovate (Ashoori 37).4 In Persian culture, poetry was and is a way of existing, a way of relating to and conceiving the world: a political action. But since globalization, poetry has become more of a symbolic act, and visual language has become the poetic language of the country to overcome censorship (Tavakolian 2020).5 At the same time, having lived for the past ten years in the Netherlands, I have learned to approach reality through philosophy and rationalizing. For instance, if we follow the views of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), contemporary political reality confronts us with the lack of an unambiguous orientation that direct our actions. In his publication Liquid Times (2007), living in a century of uncertainty, he names five developments that contribute to that (post-) modern uncertainty. First, is the transition from solid to liquid modernity: social structures change faster than anyone can anticipate. Second, is the separation of power and politics: politics outsources its tasks to the market and thus reduces citizens to consumers. Third, is the abolition of the solidarity principle and its expansion in the fourth element: post history in which the action is focused on the present. And finally, there is hyper-individualistic reflexivity: all responsibility lies with the individual, who must be able to oversee all possibilities within the contemporary capriciousness 12~ „[t]hat may not bring collective liberation, but it does bring relief: so the plan is, and we pretend there is a plan, we can execute it, but, if we abandon the plan, then only tyranny and chaos will reign” (De Cauter 140). and must be flexible (Bauman 15-19). He summarizes the development towards these five orientations with three metaphorical archetypes: the forester (Christian Middle Ages), the gardener (rational modernity), and the hunter (liquid modernity) (Bauman 132). If we combine five orientations and the metaphor of the hunter described by Bauman, we can argue that we have become hunters of neo-liberal information. Since the gigantic mechanism of neoliberalism has been forming our realities, the thread of truth is not in the hand of stories coming from human experience but is in the hands of economic forces pursuing their own stories. Therefore, I can agree with the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) argument in his essay The Storyteller (1936) about the death of storytelling and experience both in the West and East. However, what I argue is that, in the metropolises of the twenty-first century, the way we communicate is determined by the technology and by the markets, or economic considerations and by algorithmic selection. Therefore, the public domain is influenced by sentiments rather than conversational reasoning—affecting emotions, such as feelings of hope and fear. Thus, literature (poetry and philosophy) and the public domain (i.e., the state, stock market, and, since the past decade, social media) offer us specific opportunities to get to grips with who we are in the world. But the public domain also has the tendency to master our cognition and existence, and this is when we can speak of a lack of freedom. Yet, artists—such as Newsha Tavakolian (1981), Iranian photographer and a Magnum photos member, whose work is going to be discussed further in this paper—as visual freedom fighters, teach us that it is still possible to walk on a tightrope above the city and look down with a critical gaze to translate what is happening.

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