1
In the winter of 2009 in Iran, after the ‘Green Movement’ had died down, after the government had responded to the demonstrators with gunfire, after people were beginning to despair about whether change in the country’s political system could be achieved at all and were crawling back onto the sofa from the streets, I started running. For me, running was an alternative to the demonstrations that were no longer taking place and to the freedom that we had lost for the umpteenth time. To escape the images of policemen and the smell of tear gas that had stuck in my mind, I ran on a street where, behind the metal fences, you could see the aspiring class of new money who had earned their living by circumventing Western sanctions; they played golf awkwardly with imported non-standard golf clubs on artificial turf in their leisure hours.

My decision to run came suddenly, unprepared and without a coach. I couldn’t even wait to warm up. Like an alcoholic drinking his beer right outside the supermarket, I was so impatient to get on the road that gave me an illusion of liberation. Because I didn’t warm up, this newfound pleasure ended very quickly for me; after a few times, the muscles in the back of my leg suddenly cramped up and the orthopaedic surgeon banned me from running indefinitely.

2
Freedom is a state, just like running; you set yourself an imaginary goal, for example to get from point A to point B, but the goal is not to physically move, but to experience the freedom in between; that’s how it was for me. It wasn’t about the record or the distance. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. I ran until I ran out of breath, until one of my leg muscles or my heart sounded the alarm; I didn’t even stop there. I told myself to keep going for another hundred steps. Are you still alive? You can still make it, one hundred more steps. It’s not surprising that I did such damage to my body in such a wrong way, a kind of self-retaliation after the disappointment of the revolution.

3
Aber warum der blinde Läufer? Samaneh Ahmadian, die Dramaturgin dieser Aufführung, zeigte mir zuerst das Foto der blinden Läufer neben ihren Begleitern bei den Paralympischen Spielen in Tokio. Zwei Körper mit zusammengebundenen Händen, einer mit verbundenen Augen, der andere mit weit geöffneten Augen, rennen mit aller Kraft. Als ich diese Fotos sah, regte sich etwas in mir. Diesmal hat das Laufen, das für mich schon immer ein Bild der Freiheit war, die Definition von Freiheit noch besser abgerundet. Für einen blinden Menschen mit seinem Blindenführer ist die Freiheit ein kollektives Phänomen. Man kann nicht frei sein, wenn man allein ist. In der Gegenwart der Menge gewinnen die Freiheit und der Kampf um sie an Bedeutung.

4
In September 2022, Niloofar Hamedi was the first journalist to report on the hospitalisation and eventual death of Mahsa Amini reported on a brawl with the vice squad. This report triggered the social uprising of ‘Woman Life Freedom’. Niloofar Hamedi was arrested a few days after her report was published and is still in prison without trial. She and her husband, who is also a marathon runner, launched various campaigns to publicise the voices of political prisoners. For example, Nilofar announced that she would do a sun salutation from her cell every morning at 8 a.m. or run twice a week in slippers in the prison yard. Her husband also turned running outside the prison into a campaign for Niloofar’s release. To this day, numerous runners run in various marathons for Niloofar’s release.

5
Zia Nabavi, a political prisoner who spent eight years of his youth in one of the Islamic Republic’s prisons, wrote his master’s thesis on ‘The Phenomenology of the Prison Experience’. For this thesis, he interviewed dozens of political prisoners, which was very revealing for someone like me who knew nothing more than what was published on social media. In the introduction to his work, Nabavi writes: ‘The approach of the “positional media” (the heavily state-controlled and censored media in Iran) to the issue of prison is based on the notions of “rehabilitation” and “punishment”, and the approach of the opposition media also frames the issue of prison in terms of “torture” and “repression”, and therefore both are largely blind to the real experience of prison.’ He claims that the dominance of these two political approaches in the public media has meant that the experience of prison is very surprising and unfamiliar to someone who is dealing with this experience for the first time. ‘Contrary to popular belief, prison is not a place without any sign of life, but a unique and different quality of life flows there that cannot be understood through the political lens through which we have chosen to view it.’ Reading this three hundred page study was a gift for someone seeking an artistic, humanistic approach to political prisoners. I owe Zia Nabavi more than just a bottle of wine.

6
Immigrants are either fleeing dictators who are puppets of the world powers or they are fleeing poverty, resulting from centuries of plundering of their property by colonisers. Yet Europeans are unwilling to take responsibility for destabilising the lives of these people, instead doing their best to push them back into their destabilised countries. (Just re-read the Illegal Immigration Bill that was debated in the House of Commons in March 2023: Anyone who enters ‘illegally’ cannot claim asylum and the Home Secretary has a duty to deport them). As a result, immigrants have no choice but to take dangerous routes, such as the Eurotunnel, through which trains travel at a speed of 160 km/h every few hours. If they don’t manage to cover the 38 kilometre distance before the Paris-London high-speed train passes through, all that remains are their bloodstains on the wall.

Amir Reza Koohestani
April 2023