To the artists, creatives, and heritage professionals of Iran, and especially to those working under pressure, under surveillance, under grief,
I am writing as one writes to a fire brigade while the city still smolders. Not to instruct you in courage, you have already been drafted into that office, but to name what your work already is:
A public trust.
A national asset.
A form of lawful custody.
Because what is being attacked in Iran right now is not only the body, though the body is paying first. What is being attacked is the archive of reality.
The reports arriving through blackouts and fear describe mass violence against protesters, catastrophic injuries consistent with live ammunition and birdshot, and patterns that medical experts and human rights observers say point to deliberate, disabling force. And because communications have been repeatedly restricted, even counting the dead becomes a contested act, a struggle between testimony and disappearance. In such conditions, the first casualty is often evidence, and the second is meaning.
So let this be a letter of reminder, and also a quiet legal brief disguised as a candle. Your work matters because it is not decoration. It is not a luxury good for calmer times.
It is a ledger, a witness, a monument in motion.
Here is the definition clause, stated plainly, because clarity is its own form of resistance.
By “collective amnesia,” I mean three entwined phenomena:
The first is intimate and neurological: the trauma-induced blank spaces that appear in a survivor’s memory when the mind, under unbearable strain, performs triage, sealing away scenes too incandescent to touch.
The second is civic and political: the engineered fading, distortion, or rewriting of public history, especially after mass violence, when power wants the past to become a rumor and the archive to learn obedience.
The third is commercial and managerial: the post-trauma temptation, even after a regime collapses, to treat grief as a market liability, a stain on the brand of “normalcy,” something investors, tourists, and would-be reformers would prefer not to see. In this logic, remembrance is dismissed as “divisive,” mourning is reclassified as “unproductive,” and calls for truth are waved away as bad for business, as though a nation were a storefront and history an inconvenient audit. These three currents reinforce one another until silence stops sounding like fear and starts sounding like everyday life.
And here is the sentence that must follow: memory is not merely emotion, it is cultural property held in public trust, and suppressing it is a kind of unlawful disposal.
If that sounds severe, it is because the stakes are severe. Nations do not only perish by invasion or famine. They also perish by falsification. When a people lose access to their own story, they become tenants in someone else’s narrative.
You, the makers, are one of the last lines between a lived truth and an official fiction. Not because artists are saints, but because artists are record-keepers with different instruments. You keep what courts struggle to admit: atmosphere, dread, the shape of a silence in a room, the way fear edits a sentence mid-breath. You preserve the human remainder after statistics have finished their cold arithmetic.
Heritage professionals, too, know something that politicians pretend not to: preservation is not nostalgia. Preservation is continuity. It is the legal and cultural mechanism by which a nation can say, “This happened,” and mean it in a way that survives intimidation, fashion, and fatigue.
International law, in its driest language, already agrees with you. The UNESCO World Heritage Convention warns that the “deterioration or disappearance” of cultural heritage impoverishes not only a state but the heritage of all nations. UNESCO’s convention on intangible cultural heritage recognizes how living practices, knowledge, and expression face threats of disappearance and calls for safeguarding. Even the 1954 Hague framework, born from the wreckage of the Second World War, treats cultural property as something to be protected and speaks directly to the role of heritage professionals in that protection. The law is telling us, in its blunt way, that what you steward is not optional.
But the law also has a weakness: it often arrives late, wearing sensible shoes, taking notes on the rubble. That is why your work cannot wait for “after.”
There will be an “after,” and it will bring its own dangers. One of the most seductive will be the campaign of normalization. The brochures will appear. The phrases will bloom like algae: “moving forward,” “turning the page,” “reopening,” “rebuilding.” There is nothing wrong with rebuilding. There is something wrong with rebuilding on top of unmarked graves of truth.
This is where the business version of amnesia becomes slick and persuasive. Someone will argue, gently, that the nation needs stability, that dwelling on atrocities harms the economy, that grief frightens capital, that memorials are bad optics, that truth commissions are “polarizing.” They will speak as if justice were a luxury line item, as if remembrance were a hobby that can be postponed until the exchange rate improves. They will try to buy your silence with the promise of funding, visibility, a seat at a table that is set with forgetting.
Do not mistake that table for peace.
Peace without memory is only quiet. And quiet can be manufactured.
I want to pause here for a necessary ethical line. I do not compare Iran’s present atrocities to the Holocaust, which was historically specific and directed at the Jewish people. I mention the well-documented phenomenon of denial and distortion after mass violence only to underline a structural warning: even when facts exist, power can try to sand them down, especially as witnesses are exhausted and institutions are pressured. That is why safeguarding is not rhetoric. It is infrastructure.
And you are the engineers of that infrastructure.
What does this mean in practice, beyond the noble fog of words?
It means treating your present-day materials as future evidence. Photographs, sketches, drafts, stage notes, voice memos, choreography notations, exhibition plans, emails, posters, zines, even the scraps that feel too small to matter. The small things are often the only honest things left after propaganda has finished repainting the walls.
It means thinking like an archivist and a jurist at once. Provenance matters. Dates matter. Context matters. If you can, keep versions. Keep original files. Keep metadata. Keep a simple record of who made what, when, where, and under what conditions. Make duplicates, then make duplicates of the duplicates. Store them in more than one physical location, and if it is safe, in more than one jurisdiction. The goal is not paranoia. The goal is continuity.
It means safeguarding not only objects but voices. Oral histories are not indulgence, they are national documentation. When trauma scrambles memory, testimony may arrive non-linear and fragmented. That does not make it worthless. It makes it human. Your job is not to force a neat narrative but to keep the fragments from being swept away.
It also means practicing care. Do no harm is not only medical, it is archival. If recording a testimony endangers someone, anonymize. Delay publication. Use coded storage. Let safety set the tempo. A nation needs its witnesses alive.
And it means refusing the lie that heritage begins centuries ago. Heritage is also what is happening this week, this night, this hour. When the UN Human Rights Council extends investigative mandates and insists on monitoring and preserving evidence, it is acknowledging that documentation is not a hobby, it is the precondition for accountability. This is not abstract. It is the difference between a future that can prosecute facts and a future forced to debate whether facts exist.
Iranians, too, will have our Nuremberg Trials – louder, more efficient, more damning.
If you are an artist, your canvas is not only a surface. It is a repository.
If you are a curator, your exhibition is not only arrangement. It is an argument about what deserves to remain.
If you are a filmmaker, your footage is not only story. It is record.
If you are a playwright, your dialogue is not only artifice. It is the echo of what people could not say in public.
If you are a conservator, your gloves are not only protective. They are ceremonial, the way one handles a nation’s pulse.
And if you are weary, if the weight of “for the nation” feels like an impossible commission, remember this: preserving does not require you to carry everything alone. Preservation can be distributed. It can be communal. It can be done in networks of trust, in diasporic mirrors, in quiet collaborations between studios and storage rooms, between museums and kitchens, between laptops and locked cabinets.
A nation is not only the state. A nation is the people’s capacity to remember themselves.
So I am asking you, with solemnity and with urgency, to treat your work and your memories as part of Iran’s cultural inheritance. Guard them the way one guards a family name. Guard them the way one guards a key. Not for spectacle, not for revenge, not even primarily for politics, but for posterity, for law, for dignity, for the simple right of a future Iran to know what happened to it.
Let the record survive.
Let the nation keep its evidence.