It is not always the military who mistakenly shoots an innocent. Neither is it the people who mistakenly place their destinies in the hands of a leader who does not understand humans, life, freedom. Sometimes someone looking at a photograph of those military forces and people can also make a mistake: like I, who upon seeing this photograph of the 1979 Revolution, assumed that a barrage of bullets from a machine gun, have hit the earth beneath the feet of the protesters and have spewed upwards—as if flower bushes—the sand and stones from the ground.
In the Persian language, in which I speak, golooleh [bullets] and gol [flowers], are so similar in their phonemes that golooleh seems to be a flower that is shot from the looleh [barrel] of a gun. I always imagined that the metaphorical relationship between golooleh and gol, can only seem to be interesting and meaningful to those who speak in Persian, until I came across these images in a book.
In these photographs, it would seem that this time, golooleh is no longer a gol which would bud in a soil of gunpowder and bloom out of a gun barrel, but instead as soon as it pierces the body, it runs deep roots and blossom like a flower. However, is a flower which blossoms out of a bullet inside a body, always the same flower? It is not always so: from the bodily earth, flowers blossom variedly, even if the flowers which the people of a revolution inserted into gun barrels, were always carnations. Perhaps unaware that a few years earlier than their 1979 Revolution, another revolution had become so intertwined with flowers and bullets that it took on the name of “The Carnation Revolution”. In my search of photographs of the carnations of 1979, the idealist women, men and children whose faces I came across, were always distant and strange for me. I never imagined that these very faces could again be seen on the streets: the faces of women holding flowers in one hand and the victory sign in the other, or of course their hair as a banner, flowing in the winds of freedom. The truth was that the carnations of the photographs of 1979, wilted and withered away. However, those guns and bullets are always waiting to to again bud within bodily earth. In that year, the people shouted this slogan at the military, “Ask it from Iran’s Army, were Bullets the right reply to FLOWer?” This question could again be heard years after that photograph of the 1979 Revolution was taken by David Burnett: from the screams pushed from women’s throats, who were this time not placing the flowers down the barrels of guns, but rather covering the hollow of where their eyes once sat but had now been shot by bullets. Burnett’s book is titled: 44 Days, Iran and the Remaking of the World. 44 years after those 44 days, again in Iran, a world is once more in the remaking…
Homayoun Sirizi (1981, Tehran) is an architect, artist, writer and curator known for his ingenuity at extracting coincidences of time, language, history and politics from archival materials. His works investigate the dark and sometimes satirical possibilities of history. Sirizi studied architecture at University of Tehran. He has exhibited in Austria, Belgium, USA, Italy, Russia, Germany and Turkey. His work has been included in the 13th and 15th Biennale di Venezia International Architecture Exhibition, the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, the 9th Alanica Symposium, Vladikavkaz, dOCUMENTA 13, Germany and the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey.