Tehran Monoxide is an ongoing art project started in 2010 by Negar Farajiani, initially in response to Tehran’s significant air pollution problem and the potential impact on children’s health. Farajiani’s work focuses on raising awareness about air pollution and encouraging environmental responsibility through creative exploration and hands-on activities. Through these endeavors, the project has empowered many individuals, particularly young people, to become stewards of their environment and contribute to a healthier future.
The project has taken on an expansive scope over the years: from setting up an art exhibition at a school to engaging with people in a downtown pharmacy; from learning about the effects of house plants on air pollution to peddling plants on the street and building a forest of exhaust pipes in a treeless garden; and from teaching schoolchildren to being taught by them. The chronicle of Negar’s ten-year project started with a simple question on air pollution in Tehran and grew to creating “Green Corners” in classrooms and various nooks and crannies around the city.
Growing out of her concern over Tehran’s increasing levels of air pollution and the potential impacts on her young son, Aban, the artist began brainstorming how to raise awareness about the topic and find ways to connect with people who either shared her concern or indeed needed to become concerned. And so, using her artist background, Negar initiated the project by inviting fellow artists to collaborate on Tehran Monoxide as an exhibition of art presented at a school, implying that the artworks would carry an educational aspect that the schoolchildren could benefit from. However, as the process unfolded, it became obvious that it was in fact the artists who could learn much from the schoolchildren, as well as other students around Tehran. When the young people were provided an opportunity to contribute to the project, they raised issues and perspectives on air pollution and how it affects their lives that the artists — many of whom were parents — realized were new to them, even though they had thought they knew and understood them well.
Negar’s most important approaches with Tehran Monoxide include her insistence on exploring different paths; her flexibility in positioning each of the project’s phases within the larger context; her passion for inviting people from all walks of life to engage, collaborate, and share; and, most notably, her belief in the abilities and potential of young children and teenagers to bring fresh ideas and possibilities into the mix.
The artist’s attitude has always been nurturing and motherly: as the project grows and develops new directions, potentials, recognition, needs, and desires, Negar remains willing to keep her arms open and support the changing tracks. While in some instances this approach requires her to forgo her artistic and curatorial authority over some short-term and temporary outcomes, it is her persistent and unconditional care that ultimately has helped Tehran Monoxide learn to walk on its own feet — even if that growth has been rather gradual. The project has the potential to become an entirely autonomous entity in the future: as part of school syllabi and educational curricula, or as an initiative that could be repeated or reenacted in other places in the world, with necessary modifications based on local circumstances and contexts. Or it may travel an entirely different path.
Ashkan Zahraei, Editor’s Note (excerpt), Tehran, September 2021.
Starting around 2010, Tehran Monoxide has been a continuous part of my life. What marked the actual start of the project involved both my approach in presenting my work and the tools I began to use to take the work forward. My studio became the city and its people. While I started the project by focusing on urban air pollution and its effects on the lives of us citizens, the city itself soon became the main focus and concept of my work. This occurred because my household welcomed a new member: my son, Aban. I became increasingly concerned about both the small and large issues in my environment, most of them related to the city and the people living in it, with the most notable issue being that of air pollution.
I started to talk about the pollution issue with my friends, especially other parents facing similar circumstances, asking whether they were willing to think about the matter more and perhaps even work on the subject together. Our community slowly grew. That period coincided with a time of extreme air pollution in Tehran and great economic and political trouble in the country. During the project’s initial stages, we agreed to not limit our scope to the visual arts, so we talked not only with photographer Shadi Ghadirian but also musician and composer Ali Samadpour as well as Mercedeh Sadeghi, executive director at the Kherad Art House and a trained film director. Artists from fields such as cinema, theater, music, literature, fashion design, and the visual arts joined our community in a short period of time, and soon our group numbered forty members. We shared a common concern and focused on the subject of air pollution while each working in our medium of choice.
To engage children and teenagers with the project, we sought spaces that would automatically warrant their presence. After some consideration, we decided to approach a school in Tehran to host Tehran Monoxide. Manzoumeh Kherad Institute, which serves preschool through high school students, emerged as the most suitable option, because the school could accommodate a wide range of viewers, including students, teachers, staff, parents, and families, and could also host audiences from the larger Tehran community. The opening date was set for October 7, 2011, Children’s Day, and displayed artworks by forty artists for two weeks. The artists enthusiastically contributed to the exhibition design, and we tailored the ideas, approaches, layout, and content of the show with children and teenagers in mind. The number and diversity of visitors was significant: approximately 1,500 students, in addition to an even larger number of parents, teachers, and staff, visited the exhibition and were allowed to interact with almost all of the artworks.
The majority of the works focused on issues related to Tehran and its citizens, and most importantly, the issue of air pollution. The most notable aspect of the exhibition was its visitors, especially the school’s students and the other children whose presence and interaction with the show and its artworks made the project complete.
As I began envisioning the future direction of the project, I initiated discussions with several people I knew in the education sector and proposed collaborative and educational workshops that could be hosted at schools. I then met Shahrouz Hakimi, a botanist in his late twenties, who ran a greenhouse in Ekbatan Town, a neighborhood of large apartment complexes in west Tehran. Biloba Greenhouse had a delightful atmosphere, and Shahrouz showed immediate interest in collaborating with Tehran Monoxide and was willing to share his knowledge.
I explained how I hoped to create a curriculum for a series of workshops that could be hosted at schools. We both agreed that it would be best to focus on the first years of primary school. These workshops would cover topics seldom discussed in Iranian schools, such as caring for the environment, the effect of plants on the quality of air and urban life, and many other basic environmental issues. After outlining the topics and procedures, we agreed on creating an educational workshop around Zoufa (also known as Hyssopus officinalis or hyssop, a medicinal herb from the mint family).
Since schoolchildren usually spend a major part of their day — at least seven hours — at school, working together on such a project could teach them about plants, the environment, and social responsibility. Meanwhile, the collaboration this project would require among the students could improve their sense of belonging to the school and the overall classroom atmosphere. For instance, the presence of plants in a classroom necessitates the space to have sufficient natural light, humidity levels, and air flow, as a lack of these factors will cause plants to die. Looking after plant life could help the students themselves evaluate the quality of these parameters in the classroom.
We developed a qualitative scoring system for the schoolchildren and decided that, if the class managed to keep the first set of plants alive and well during the first month, they would be given more plants, gradually increasing the number of plants in the classroom, and thus requiring more collaboration and responsibility from the children. Furthermore, the Green Corners would improve the classroom’s air quality, appearance, and mood, especially from December to late February, when air pollution in Tehran is extremely high. It is important to note that our work would not have been possible without the collective efforts of the school teachers and staff.
We coordinated a field trip to the Biloba Greenhouse for a number of the students in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. There they were able to look around, ask questions, and learn about how a greenhouse works, how plants grow, and how they improve people’s moods, air quality, and much more. Shahrouz was present to talk to the kids and answer their questions. The children eagerly walked around the greenhouse and seemed to enjoy the experience. The field trip provided them with a brief introduction to what would later be discussed in more detail during the Green Corners workshops. At the greenhouse, we divided the students into groups of three and taught them how to pot Golden Pothos (Epipremnum aureum). The pots and stands that Shahrouz used for the sessions were the ones designed for the Green Corners, and so identical to the ones the students would later use in their classrooms. After about three hours at the greenhouse, each class took one plant back to the school.
The first Green Corners session took place on November 28, 2019. Shahrouz and I started by reflecting on the field trip and the topics we discussed at the greenhouse. We planned to install the stands and pots in suitable locations in the classrooms, with help from the students. Before joining the students in the classrooms, we briefed several teachers on how we conducted our visit to the greenhouse. We also provided suggestions regarding how to incorporate aspects of the project and information about the plants into the teaching curriculum, including in science, math, and art, and we asked the teachers to contribute to the Green Corners. The triangle of communication that formed between the teachers, students, and us made the workshops run more smoothly, as our own meetings with the students were infrequent.
Golden Pothos is commonly referred to as “devil’s ivy,” since it requires little sunlight and stays green even in relatively dimly lit places. Consequently, we expected a high success rate. We visited the classes once a month to discuss the health and care of the plants with the schoolchildren. During that school year, I was continuously impressed by how well the students, teachers, and school staff had managed to take care of the plants. After the first month, we hosted a second session at the Biloba Greenhouse to introduce a second plant species to the schoolchildren: Aglaonema, or as it is commonly known, the Chinese Evergreen.
Each plant stand featured a plain white face measuring twenty-five by fifteen centimeters so the students could add whatever notes, colors, illustrations, or whatever else they wished. On my monthly visits to the classes, I observed the many creative ways that the students used these plant stands, including to add notes listing student names and the days they were responsible for watering the plants, small paintings, and glued-on autumn leaves. A class of first-graders painted the face of the stand and wrote “Pink Box” on it, while fifth-graders came up with characters representing each plant and depicted them having bubble conversations with one other.
By late March, the students were taking care of their third plant, Peperomia, also known as the Radiator Plant, and the majority of the teachers had now integrated Green Corners into their curriculum. The front plates of the stands continued to showcase many of the students’ creative ideas, and the plants were growing healthily. Meanwhile, another result of the project was that it prompted schoolchildren to talk about plants with their parents and discuss how keeping such plants in their houses could affect the quality of the air.
As a result of the first Green Corners project, I was invited to hold similar workshops in other Iranian cities and towns. One of these projects was two consecutive one-day workshops in the city of Bam, in Kerman Province in southeastern Iran. We aimed the workshop at child survivors of the devastating 2003 Bam earthquake, which killed more than 26,000 people and injured many more. I traveled to Bam along with botanist Parnian Tussi and photographer Samaneh Gholamnejad in March 2019. Parnian and I were in charge of the workshops, and Samaneh documented the event. We held two sessions, one in a building called Hanassabi and the second at an orphanage. We were deeply moved by the project’s success and by seeing children who were growing up without parental support motivated to try to create a better environment for themselves.
The Green Corners workshop made me think more deeply about the challenges of educating children about nature and the preservation of the environment, and whether books and even hands-on learning in the classroom are sufficient compared to working directly outdoors. I do not doubt that if young people could learn about nature while being surrounded by it, they would absorb better ways to contribute to its preservation.
As our recent collective experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, it is impossible to measure the impact of the unknowns, and today, more than ever, we face risks created by our own misuse of natural resources and misunderstandings about the environment. Tehran Monoxide believes in personal and collective responsibility: however small, individual effort can be effective, at least in raising awareness, distributing reliable information, and developing knowledge and practice. In this sense, Tehran Monoxide started as an experiment and continued in many forms. In its journey, while constantly evolving and changing, its outcomes, challenges, achievements, and failures have brought about many meaningful discussions, encounters, possibilities, and potentials. Each step led to another, and a rather small initiative turned into a multifaceted project, one that has gone far beyond its original scope and means.
Negar Farajiani, Ashkan Zahraei, “Tehran Monoxide: 2010–,” in mohit.art NOTES #12 (August/September 2024); published on www.mohit.art, July 26, 2024.
