About
"When the Ground Gives Way"
This project is an art exhibition that examines the Baghestan flood gardens, a thousand-year-old system that once surrounded the city of Qazvin, Iran, and managed water and soil through collective care. In this art exhibition, I approach Baghestan as a system of collective knowledge that shaped how people acted together without centralized authority. Through visual maps based on stories from my community, along with sculptures and installations, the exhibition traces how reciprocal infrastructures once fed water back into the aquifer. I examine ancestral water and soil systems in Qazvin, Iran—not to frame their loss as a new climate disaster, but to understand how colonial and modern forms of governance reshaped the landscape and made those systems impossible.The artworks do not propose solutions; These are inquiries into the conditions under which collective action once existed — and whether those conditions can even be perceived today.
Nooshin Hakim Javadi is Assistant Professor of Art & Design.
