What if you could get to know a stranger by asking a question that evokes desire? 

This Story Doesn’t Begin With Me, invites participants to consider what they long for or where they belong when introducing themselves. Through this experience, we will attempt to discover a more precise and relevant vocabulary, specific to our new relationship towards ourselves and others.

“Where are you from?”

Our identities are subjected to trauma and systematic violence that nation-state projects through identification, definition and categorization. My Iranian heritage and status as a dual citizen of both the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been used to justify state surveillance - discrimination and exposure, which not everyone are forced to undergo.

To offer participants a sense of this experience, I stage This Story Doesn’t Begin With Me in a dimly lit bedroom, inviting people to shine a flashlight on me and the surrounding installation while engaging in dialogue. As the conversation evolves, we consider whose lives matter and how these lives are counted as valuable in order to go beyond forms of identification that are linked to nationhood and the justification of endless wars. This encounter creates a sense of ease and hospitality - social intimacy that is conducive to sharing personal history - used as a strategy to counteract the positioning cultures of fear.

This Story Doesn’t Begin With Me is the first performance in the Waking Up Iranian American series. The project is an autoethnographic work focused on the ways cultural exchange develops between a performer and a participant. These encounters create a space where people are invited to participate in discussions and actions about being between cultures, nationalism, and Islamophobia, so that we might move beyond antiquated notions of free and oppressed.