بقا - baqaa (2026- Present)

بقا - baqaa(survival) is an ongoing participatory archive initiated in Tehran through weekly gatherings centered around blackout poetry and conversation.

The exercise and conversation center a simple question “What has it felt like to live in Iran since June 2025?” Working with existing texts - some pages the exact same, some varying - participants uncover their own narratives, whether personal or collective, by preserving the words that resonate with their lived experiences, transforming acts of erasure into acts of authorship. Through this process, personal fragments become part of a collective record—an archive created by the people living through history, not reconstructed after it has passed. The intention of بقا is to archive what it has felt like living through a challenging historic time, for the peoples by the peoples. Unlike historic events that are often told later through a single-person POV, بقا intends to capture a wide range of experinces as they unfold.

The conversations are recorded alongside the evolving collection of blackout poems, forming a growing audiovisual archive that will continue to develop into an immersive installation of shared memory and collective testimony.