PublicationNotes #15

I was born in Ahvaz. I don’t remember much from my childhood; when others recount memories from that time, I struggle to visualize them. The earliest image I recall is from a trip with my mother from Ahvaz to Shiraz. I was four years old, and as soon as I stepped off the bus, something at the end of the street caught my attention, something I had never seen before: a mountain. There is no trace of this mountain in our album. The earliest existing photograph of me is a studio portrait. I was supposed to be alone in that photograph, but my mother was there. The photographer’s attempt to crop her out was not entirely successful, as part of her finger remains in the frame. Later, my mother began to assist photographers in erasing her presence from images of her children. Is it possible to recover memories from refusals, from erasures, from what was unintentionally captured?

I was known as an “oil company kid,” living in a world entirely surrounded by company-owned facilities: residential complexes, cars, schools, clubs, restaurants, and hospitals — everything was the company’s property. What aspects of my memories could this cohesive oil identity encompass? And, at the same time, could it obscure parts of my memories, ones I cannot recall?

Oil’s presence in my life traces back to before I was born, to a century ago, when my great-grandmother, Shahneh, a young Arab woman, moved with her five children and husband from their village to Abadan to start a new life. Her husband failed to find a job at the Abadan refinery and decided to trade goods between Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. One day, he set out on a sea voyage but never returned home. Shahneh returned to her village in central Khuzestan, but her tribe rejected her and her children, even forbidding her from choosing a family name for them. She returned to Abadan, obtained identity documents for her children under various surnames with the help of acquaintances, and raised them alone. There is no evidence of how Shahneh managed to survive this life.

The earliest visual record of her family is a photograph of her son, Mohsen, during his military service. It was taken when the national army was forming, and he was dispatched as a soldier to guard the Iran-Iraq border and arrest smugglers. Could the abundance of military photographs of Mohsen at the border, taken with large-format cameras in a staged studio setup, hint at the story of Shahneh’s husband’s disappearance at the frontier? Could the moments when this family becomes visible in images guide us through the mechanisms of their erasure from history? Nearly twenty years after these military photographs, the family would appear in front of the camera once again, this time in an oil company–owned house in Abadan — by then, Mohsen had managed to find work as a laborer at the refinery, and Shahneh had already passed away. This photograph would also be the first to capture Yuma, Mohsen’s wife.

Yuma was an Arab woman and a spiritual healer who hosted Zaar rituals in her home. Zaar is a practice in which music, chants, and dance are used to expel or appease spirits believed to cause illness or distress. Their home was situated in the Pirouzabad neighborhood, a residential area for oil-company workers along the Bahmanshir River. According to the official maps available in the British Petroleum Archive and the National Library of Iran, this neighborhood was once a palm garden belonging to Indigenous Arabs of Abadan. For these people, the palm gardens were not only agricultural lands and animal shelters but also believed to be the dwelling places of spirits. As the refinery expanded and the groves shrank, the number of cases of patients whom doctors couldn’t cure increased in the city. Yuma helped these people by calming the spirits that possessed them. In exchange for her healing services, patients gave Yuma money and valuable gifts. Women were summoned by Yuma to sing and play daf, receiving payment for each ceremony. Additionally, under the spirits’ instructions, Yuma crafted numerous gold jewelry pieces, which were later inherited by her daughter, Jamileh, who had also inherited her mother’s supernatural powers. Due to a lack of camera access, no photographs of these ceremonies exist, but Jamileh managed to take two portraits of Yuma at home while possessed by the spirits.

Jamileh married a Persian-speaking man who worked alongside her father at the refinery. As a housewife, Jamileh could not continue her mother’s practice of hosting dance and singing rituals for patients at home. Instead, her connection with the spirits evolved into a relationship of metaphorical messages. The spirits would communicate with her indirectly, presenting each message through specific family photographs. Jamileh was told that the meaning lay within her albums, so she would carefully examine each image, trying to decipher words or phrases associated with them. By piecing these words together, she could construct the complete message, making the meaning emerge not only from each individual photograph but from the unique arrangement of photographs within her plastic-sleeve album.

One of the lost pieces from her album is the only picture of Shahla, who had given this album to Jamileh as a gift from Kuwait. No one, including Jamileh, knows (or at least pretends not to know) what happened to it. Shahla was Jamileh’s niece, a girl who ran away from Mohsen and Yuma’s house when she was young and never returned. The family assumed her to be a prostitute who worked in brothels and never mentioned her name.

One of the messages Jamileh received from the spirits included Shahla’s missing photograph. To decode this message, Jamileh began composing poetry by observing how the other images were arranged. She intentionally left blanks in her puzzle where words related to Shahla’s photograph would go, hoping that these missing words might eventually reveal the message as a whole. The words and phrases Jamileh noted in relation to this photograph are recorded in her notebook as follows:

The unseen feels like the mountain I once glimpsed at the end of a street, a fleeting moment that resists being fully captured or remembered. Growing up surrounded by the oil company’s world, I was immersed in its structures and rhythms, yet I now wonder: what was left outside its frame? What stories were erased or left unseen to establish, perceive, and acknowledge my environment as an “oil space”? Jamileh’s albums, filled with absences and erasures, remind me that what is unseen is never truly absent but is instead woven into the gaps and silences of our stories.

Jamileh gave me Yuma’s jewelry, pieces created under the guidance of spirits that once spoke through her mother. These objects would be reduced to totems only if forced to conform to the values of the oil world. In that world, such objects and beliefs are dismissed as mere backward traditions, irrational practices, or non-scientific ways of knowing.

However, The Unseen seeks to move beyond these lines of meaning-making. I considered these objects, along with Jamileh’s practice of assembling and interpreting her albums, as part of the fabric of multiple social realities embedded within the heart of the space of oil production. These objects and practices carry the potential to reveal not only what has been unacknowledged as part of Abadan’s story but also the coexistence of interwoven realities within oil production sites — realities that cannot be neatly delineated with lines and rulers. Speaking of these absences is not merely an act of remembrance but a form of questioning: to ask how much of what we know is shaped by the unseen and what truths might emerge if we look more closely.