Methodologies of Sound: The Making of the 'Woman, Life, Freedom; The Sounds of A Revolution'

Nirmal Puwar: How did the process start for you, in the making of the sound piece ‘Woman, Life, Freedom; The Sounds of A Revolution’?

Ahmadreza Hakiminejad: For us (Mahsa and I), it started on September 16, 2022, when a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman named Jina (Mahsa) Amini died in Tehran, while she was in the custody of the morality police. Following her death, people poured into the streets in many cities across Iran. Right from the beginning, many used their smart phones to document different aspects of the protests (including evidence of the regime’s violence against protestors), sharing their images and videos in the virtual space, in spite of the regime’s internet crackdown inside Iran. Like many Iranians in the diaspora, flicking through these images shared via different social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and X (Twitter) became part and parcel of our everyday. We were witnessing an unprecedented form of resistance, led by women, challenging the foundations of an ideological regime.

We were occupied, in time and space, thinking, mourning, and hoping. It was painful to watch these images from afar. This pain triggered us to think about how we could do something, however small, to amplify Iranian people’s voices outside Iran. This was extended further through a conversation with you, Nirmal, when you suggested to bring the sounds and words of the Woman, Life, Freedom to the iconic Coventry Cathedral, by adding a new layer of meaning to the space as a place for reconciliation and peace. So the idea of the sound piece was part of our response to organising this specific event in Coventry Cathedral, which aimed to place a focus on the issue and to connect different pieces of found sound, recorded and distributed on social media. In so doing, we approached Duncan (a Coventry-based sound artist and filmmaker) to work with us in editing the sound piece.  

Mahsa Alami Fariman: I remember it was in mid-November (2022), nearly 2 months after the Woman, Life, Freedom protests started in Iran, that you [Nirmal] took us to see the space [of the cathedral]. It was in the Chapel of Industry with its circular space and glass walls, that you asked us to say Woman, Life, Freedom while standing in the central alter so that we could hear the great echo of our voices circling around us, as we looked out on to the city of Coventry through the glass structure. My emotional engagement with the space began right at that moment, after I heard the echo of Woman, Life, Freedom in the Chapel. I think it was then when we decided to echo the voices of the protestors through a sound project, without images, by focusing our attention to the aural elements. I then started to collect audio-visual materials related to different protests dating back to the Islamic Republic’s inception in 1979. I initially collected 50 videoclips. After conversations with Reza and Duncan, I decided to reduce the number of videoclips from 50 to 11. And the reason for that was to create enough space for the emotional engagement with the sounds.

For me, the process started with playing, seeing, hearing, reading, tagging, and categorising all the 50 artefacts over and over again in order to decide which ones have to stay, which itself was a highly emotional and painful experience. It was difficult to let go of voices, sounds and lives. Nonetheless, we did the selection, after which I imagined a thematic thread connecting the Iranian people’s resistance during different protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution (in 1979, 2009, 2021) and the 2022 protests. I chose women as the main component of this thread. To create coherency and rhythm in narration, I created two categories: a) women’s collective resistance/protest and b) women’s individual acts of resistance, and I placed these categories one after another in the structure of the sound piece.

Duncan Whitley: The piece was created specifically for the event at Coventry Cathedral. It uses documentary audio (‘found sound’), collated by Mahsa and Reza primarily from social media posts but also from, for example, historic television broadcasts. The piece is undeniably sound-centric, but in fact makes significant use of text also: to get across important contextual information which gives the audience a route into the subject, and also in the form of translated transcriptions of the content which appear on the projected screen synchronous to the audio. So, it’s a sound-centric work, but in terms of the duration of the linear piece, there is as much text as there is sound!

In the architectural space of the cathedral this became creatively interesting, because there are periods where we are reading text and there is no sound, and we knew that these ‘silences’ could become powerful in resonance with the space. Not only would the silences resonate, but we had to think about the material transformation of sound which would occur in the cathedral’s acoustic space, with its approximately 8-second long reverb time. This meant, although working through intuition because editing took place in a different, non-reverberant space, working carefully with fade-in and fade-outs of the audio in anticipation of how they would become shaped by the voluminous acoustic space of the nave.

NP: Could you possibly reflect further on the inter-disciplinary methodological approach of this creative piece?

MAF: We used archival, sensory and digital methodologies to reflect on the social demographics, marginalised geographies, oppressive dimensions of production of space, as well as the affective dimensions of the protests through sound. In so doing, we collected, categorised and labelled video clips depicting people’s power, resistance and suffering during different protests since 1979. As I mentioned earlier, we settled on a shortlist of 50 artefacts and categorised them into individual and collective sounds. The individual sounds reflect resistance and suffering of the bodies, such as a mother who sings a lullaby at the graveyard of her child who was killed during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Or the momentum of the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan that was captured by a bystander in 2009. The collective sounds reflect on collective resistance and the production of revolutionary space between the bodies, recorded during the protests in the streets, metro stations or in cemeteries. However, when it came to the duration of the piece, we needed Duncan to use his technical vision and advise on how to maintain the sensory engagement with the production of revolutionary space beyond the visual dimensions of the archived artefacts.

DW: When Mahsa and Reza approached me to assist with editing ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, they had already done a lot of the important work by selecting the raw material they wanted to work with. They were quite clear about the rationale for the work, and the importance of the individual ‘artefacts’ (the selected pieces of ‘found sound’) they wanted to work with to create the piece. I had the sense that it was important to them that, once woven together, these artefacts would become in some way representative of the struggle in Iran: geographically, demographically, in terms of specific histories and also in terms of particular behaviours of the regime security forces. One part of my creative role was to mediate that ambition, because they wanted to include fifty individual pieces of found sound in the piece, but it felt clear to me that for purposes of duration we would need to significantly re-shape the piece. I sensed we could still intimate the complexity of their original vision- and its broader implications- in a shorter work, without losing the urgency and the power of the piece. Interestingly, what has happened now, as a development beyond the work we made for Coventry Cathedral, is that we have returned to work with a wider collection of artefacts which Mahsa and Reza have collected in a proposed ambitious new work which will take the form of a nonlinear searchable sound archive, facilitating deeper connections with the specific geographies of the struggle.   

NP: What for you is central to the sound piece?

MAF: Through the creative practice of working with a living archive of sound, we wanted to explore the Iranian women’s struggle and resistance against the systemic oppression since 1979. The sounds can take the audiences into a sensory experience of a movement they haven’t been part of. They cannot see, but they can hear and feel the fear, anger, rage, and hope. The archival methodologies (in collecting, storing, categorising and tagging) reflected on the systematic production of inequality, oppressive urban space, non-citizens, and the discrimination against different ethnic, gender and other marginalised groups by the Iranian regime.

Most specifically, the soundpiece shows 11 important moments in the history of women’s struggle since 1979. These are: the International Women’s Day march in 1979 against Khomeini’s mandatory hijab decree; the  2009 Green Movement (the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan that went viral on social media for the first time); and the 2021 protest against water shortage (the beating of a female protester in south of Iran). The rest are based on the 2022 Jina Mahsa Amini protests (the schoolgirls’ protests, the killing of Nika Shakarami, the Tehran Metro protest against systematic patriarchy, the Kurdish lullaby of Shouresh Nikanm’s mother at his grave, the Chehelom (40^th day vigil) protests in cemeteries, and the singing of female political prisoners in the Evin prison.

DW: As Mahsa has suggested, the medium of sound seems to facilitate a mode of engagement with the documented subject which has its own particularities, not least in terms of affect: we don’t just hear sound, we feel it. And surprisingly this happens in spite of the lo-fi nature of the recordings, often created in improvised conditions using mobile phones and subsequently heavily compressed for YouTube, X (ex-Twitter), Instagram and so forth. Beyond affect, the recordings mediate several layers of information, often connected to geographies (e.g. accents, dialects, specific songs, and so forth). Forensic Architecture, at Goldsmiths, have demonstrated how forensic audio analysis can build a picture of events in public space and have used these techniques to provide evidence in courts of law, so I’m also interested in this potential way of ‘reading’ the audio materials collated in the project. It’s also worth mentioning that it’s Mahsa and Reza’s choice to work with audio, even where there is visual documentation available, such as the audio in Sounds of a Revolution which documents the death of Neda Agha-Soltan (fatally shot by regime forces in 2009), where the audio has been stripped from the original video file, denying to the audience the possibility of enjoying a kind of perverse visual pleasure through observing the pain of others. 

Woman, Life, Freedom: The Sounds of A Revolution

By Mahsa Alami Fariman, Ahmadreza Hakiminejad, and Duncan Whitely

Nirmal Puwar is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Duncan Whitley is a contemporary artist, working with moving-image production and spatial sound. His practice synthesises the languages of slow cinema, observational documentary and spatial sound art.