Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi are the initiators of the bilingual Farsi/English magazine Pages, which aims to function as a platform for collaboration and exchange between artists and writers from Iran and elsewhere, and to investigate how artistic practices are both constituted by and seek to address social, political and cultural conditions.

In conjunction with their research for Pages #4, Afrassiabi and Tabatabai developed a research project for PZI, which explored the notions of public and private by investigating the significance of design in the production of privacy and publicness in different contexts.

The project looked for example at the production of the diegetic spaces of the public and private in television and the Hollywood film industry, with its stylised decors and set designs. Each genre in Hollywood has both its own social and political message and its corresponding semiotics of production design. Such representations of space not only set out notions of publicness and privacy but also produce modes of subjectivity.
The project also looked at the role of production design in the construction of our cities. Cities are often restaged as experiential environments -- either temporarily (during festivals or celebrations of various national events like elections) or permanently (tourist centres and shopping malls).

Invited guest lecturers explored these questions further.

Urbanist Ali Madanipour (UK) delivered a lecture focusing on urban, social and cultural differentiations in public and private spaces in cities.

Graphic designer Paul Elliman (UK) gave a presentation on the role of voices as sound signage ("mind the gap" or "this is a security announcement…") in defining our experience of the public spaces of cities. These disembodied voices have introduced an “acousmatic space” into the city, a space that blurs the boundaries between the space where these voices come from and the space into which they are projected.

Karen Alexander (UK), curator at the British Film Institute, presented films by the Black British film collectives Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective and discussed the specific cinematic language these Black filmmakers developed in response to the dominant political mood and the prescriptive labels of cultural difference of the time.

Artist/writer Monica Narula (India) delivered a lecture around the specificity of the public and private use of space in India, pointing to the fact that societies and cultures each have their own ways of articulating the public-private relationship. She talked of New Delhi, where “In full public view, the most intense desires, the most painful humiliations, the darkest anger, the greatest joy, the strongest love and the most profound loneliness find their fullest expression. The street is where the public act and the private motive get to know each other.” The European notion of public and private, introduced in South Asian societies during their colonial past, has always failed to correspond with the reality of these places.

The project resulted in a special section of Pages #4 (June 2005), with contributions by PZI participants Isabel Cordeiro, Alfredo Cramerotti, Lina Issa, Paul Nulty, and Renee Ridgway.

Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai are both Iranian born artists living and working in Rotterdam. Afrassiabi makes short films, videos, and installations. He also writes texts and curates film and video programmes, exploring his interest in cinema and psychoanalysis. Tabatabai makes videos, interactive installations and projects reflecting on aspects of culture in social life and urban events evolving from different contexts.