Tehran Square Mile Sound Field + Rescue Platform

Tehran Square Mile Sound Field + Rescue Platform is a sonic exploration of public spaces at the centre of the capital city of Tehran. The installation consisted of two speakers, headphones and a MP3 player placed in a small transparent box filled with objects found from the nature, aimed at drawing the attention of the audience to the contrast between the soundscapes in a metropolis like Tehran and the nature in the countryside by juxtaposing the two sounds at the gallery space.

This work was a contribution to a group exhibition at Azad Art Gallery in Tehran in 2010 with the title Tehran: 1mile² and it came out as a result of a collaborative project and an artist-in-residence program called 1mile² which took place from late 2009 until early 2010 and was commissioned by the Visiting Arts institute. The project aimed to inspire a group of local artists including Mehrdad Afsari, Mahmoud Bakhshi, Neda RazaviPour, Kianoosh Vahabi and myself as well as the London-based artist Andrew Dodds and the local ecologist Dr. Bahram Zehzad to explore the cultural and ecological diversity of a certain square mile of the city through artistic engagement.

The project involved many excursions throughout the region which at the end resulted for me in more than 3 hours of field recordings from the city. Although in the beginning I was expecting to find no sound but the noise of the traffic, as the project progressed through time, I started to discover quite unique and interesting sounds that would well represent the characteristics of Tehran: sounds like the prayer’s call playing three times a day through megaphones on top of mosques all around the city; drivers calling for passengers to fill their taxis which are being shared by several people; and music being played back through speakers to the pavement from CD/book stores. I then made 10 sound clips of 3 minutes long each to be played through the speakers at the gallery as the Tehran Square Mile Sound Field. Through a short trip to the green countryside in north of Iran I also did 2 hours of field recording from the nature which I later made into 5 clips of 2 minutes long each and played them through headphones as the Rescue Platform.