'Kak Satar': a Militant Visual Archive of Kurdish Resistance

This presentation will touch upon the making of a militant archive that documents the Kurdish struggles in Iran in 1979-90. Faithi Setar, a Kurdish fighter turned photographer, has compiled a visual archive of photographs, audio and video-recordings documenting the everyday life of Peshmergas in their struggle against the Iranian State and their grassroots actions in the Kurshish rural society after the 1979 revolution. The history of Faithi Setar’s visual archive and its rich content introduces us to lived experiences of state violence, everyday practices and moral economies of resistance within the frame of the Komala (communist) Party of Iranian Kurdistan. It is also a place for understanding and exploring the relationship and tensions between individual and collective memories, written and visual histories, paper and digital documentation processes, and archiving as a practice of resistance. The presentation of Faithi Setar’s archive allows to question further the notion of "archival activism" and examine the making of transnational counter-archives of violence. 

Brief biography: Chowra Makaremi is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. Her research focuses on the anthropology of the State, everyday and legal forms of violence, and processes of subjectivation at the margins. It also reflects on the methods of knowledge production and dissemination, with a focus on images and narrative fiction. She coordinated several research collectives on border control and detention in Europe. Since 2011, she has been working on the Iranian revolution of 1979, the genealogy of the Islamic Republic and the question of state violence, based on an ethnography of archives. She has published Aziz's Notebook at the Hearth of the Iranian Revolution (Gallimard, 2011/) and with Hannah Darabi Enghelab Street. A revolution through books 1979-83(LeBal/Spector, 2019). In 2019, she directed the movie Hitch. An Iranian Story (Alter Ego, France, 78 min.). In 2023, she published the essay Woman! Life!Freedom! Echoes of a revolutionary uprising in Iran (La Découverte). She leads the ERC research program OFF-SITE: Violence, State formation and memory politics: an off-site ethnography of post-revolution Iran