To comprehend the true scale of ecological loss, one cannot rely solely on archives or scientific metrics; at times, it is necessary to traverse the very landscape where that loss has unfolded, returning directly to the source. In 2021, I traveled to Isfahan, Iran, intending to document the historic lifeblood of the region. Instead, the profound reality of its depletion became palpable the moment I stepped onto the dust. I had entered a field site defined entirely by absence. Before me lay the desiccated expanse of the Zayandehroud—a river that generations had waded in, cultivated, and held sacred. To traverse this empty terrain was not a passive act of observation; it was a process of becoming tethered to the landscape, ultimately conscripted into its testimony.

The cracked sediment, the bleached channel edges, the absolute stillness where current once ran — these were not empty landscape. Rebecca Solnit writes that walking is “ideally, a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together” (Solnit, 2001, p. 5). This alignement, which Solnit frames as aspiration, became methodological necessity. The walk was not a technique applied to the fieldwork; it became the fieldwork itself — an embodied epistemology through which I gradually came to understand what the river’s recession had done to the people who lived beside it.

Reading that cracked surface demanded an instrument precise enough to detect its silences; Henri Lefebvre’s rhythm analysis offered the conceptual vocabulary for what my body already knew. Lefebvre argues that wherever time, space, and expenditure of energy coincide, there is rhythm (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 15) and that the rhythmanalyst must attend to the body as a “metronome” — a living instrument for reading society’s pulse (Lefebvre, 2004, pp. 19–21).

Walking the dry Zayandehroud, I was reading arrhythmia: the city’s estrangement from its own cadence, registered in cracked mud, severed irrigation channels, and the uncanny stillness that settled where water used to move. That arrhythmia, legible only to a body moving through it, was what sent me upstream—toward the dam’s evidence and the faint lines the river had left in its retreat. These lines became the catalyst for my artistic work. By bringing field notes, the methodology of walking, and visual forms into the gallery space, the exhibition functions not merely as a record of the landscape but as a tangible extension of its testimony.

LINES AS TEMPORAL RECORD

Following the river upstream, I arrived at the Zayandehroud Dam. The reservoir was a startling blue — vivid, almost surreal against the parched ochre hills. But it was the shoreline that arrested me entirely. The water level had dropped so dramatically that the banks bore terraced scars: horizontal strata of pale mineral deposit, sun-baked clay, and dark stone, each layer a former watermark, a ghost of the river’s fuller life. These were not merely geological formations. They were inscriptions — a geological memory, written by water in retreat. Solnit has observed that “language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time… this narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other” (Solnit, 2001, p. 72). The waterline scars of the dam enacted precisely this: a language of loss that could only be read by moving through it, by allowing the body to become a measuring instrument against time.

Tim Ingold’s concept of the line gave theoretical precision to what I saw. In Lines: A Brief History, Ingold draws a crucial distinction between the trace — a line that records movement through the world — and the thread — a line that connects points across a surface, observing that “it is through the transformation of threads into traces… that surfaces are brought into being” (Ingold, 2007, p. 54). The receding waterlines at the dam were simultaneously both: they traced the retreat of water across time, and they threaded together a series of ecological and political moments into a single, readable surface. Ingold further argues that movement through landscapes is a form of threading our individual biographies with that landscape (Ingold, 2007, p. 72). The shoreline was not static; it shifted with each visit, each season — its instability itself a form of communication. The landscape was not backdrop but agent, continually redrawing the terms of its own legibility.

To stand before those scarred banks was to encounter time made visible, stratified, and spatial—not metaphor, but geology as memoir. Reading this landscape was not a one-way observation but a reflexive dialogue between the scarred earth and my own embodied presence. Yet, these traces could only be deciphered alongside my own positionality as a researcher intimately implicated in what I was reading.

While the emptied shoreline revealed vulnerability and collective grief—the visible wound of an ecosystem altered by human intervention—the dam stood as a material manifestation of state power and infrastructural governance. Its layered presence exposed questions that the shoreline itself could not resolve: Who has the authority to control the movement of water? Whose knowledge of the river becomes visible, and whose remains marginalized? From what position was I, as an artist and researcher, entitled to enter this contested landscape, interpret its transformations, and name the forms of displacement unfolding within it?

THE FLUID INSIDER ON SHIFTING GROUNDS

I had assumed that being a native researcher — born in Isfahan, fluent in its idioms, familiar with its memory — would smooth my passage into fieldwork. Instead, I discovered that familiarity can produce its own estrangements. People were cautious. Trust was not assumed; it was constructed slowly, through repeated presence, through shared silences, through gestures of care that preceded any formal inquiry.

I oscillated continuously between insider and outsider, welcomed one moment and regarded with wariness the next. This oscillation, I came to understand, was not a methodological failure but a productive condition — one that bore a striking structural resemblance to the landscape I was crossing. The river too had never been stable: it had always shifted with season, with governance, with demand. My position in the field was, in this sense, already written into the terrain.

As Doreen Massey argues, space must be understood as “the product of interrelations: as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny,” and is “always under construction” (Massey, 2005, p. 9). My positionality was never fixed; it moved with conversations, landscapes, and the political sensitivities of a region where water had become inseparable from governance, power, and grievance. I was not mapping a static territory but navigating an ongoing interrelation — ethnographically, affectively, and literally. The field, like the river, was never finished, never simply there. And it was from within this instability — this shared condition of flux — that a deeper understanding of the river’s temporal crisis began to emerge.

LIVING WITH A DIMINISHED RIVER

The further I walked — from dam to riverbank, from city to desert, from dried channel to the vast and fragile wetland of Gavkhooni at the river’s end — the more clearly I understood that the ecological crisis was also a crisis of temporality. The people who lived along the Zayandehroud spoke in registers of “fat water” and “thin water,” of wet seasons and dry seasons, of what the river had been and what it was becoming. Their language carried temporal intelligence — an embodied way of measuring time through water’s rhythms, now disrupted beyond easy repair. It was a language that the scarred shoreline at the dam had already begun to speak, but that only the communities who depended on the water could fully articulate.

TRANSLATING A fieldwork experience into an art exhibition

The transition from ethnographic Research into artistic practice was not a departure from the field but a continuation of it by other means. Walking had been my method; making became its extension. The field walks — from the dam in the countryside to the riverbank in the city, through the desert, and on to Gavkhooni where the river dissolves into salt flat — had given me a narrative thread: a sequence of encounters with the same landscape across multiple temporal registers. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of temporality—particularly his assertion that “we must understand time as the subject and the subject as time” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1945], p. 490). I began to develop the concept of polytemporality to describe the coexistence of multiple, entangled temporal experiences within a shared landscape and community. The challenge was how to render that polytemporality not as an argument but as an experience, something a viewer’s body could enter rather than simply read.

The answer emerged in materialorm. For the series From Dam to Swamp: Temporal Layers and Memories in Motion, I developed a practice of abstract drawing and painting in which rolls of paper — drawn from the same background as the flat images they accompany — are attached to the surface and left to unfurl. The rolled paper made the methodology visible: each roll carries a different temporal layer of the landscape and imaginatively peeling back those layers; new dimensions are revealed. As Casey argues, places “harbor and hold memories of many kinds” (Casey, 2004, pp. 36, 39) — and precisely this harboured multiplicity that the accumulated paper surfaces seek to embody. Like footprints pressed into a path, the rolls leave ephemeral markings: reminders of presence, of pauses taken in the field, of the moments where contemplation and landscape briefly coincided.

The exhibition that emerged from this process — titled Polytemporality — became both method and message. Viewers moved through soundscapes of running water, silence, and human voices; they stood before four regions of the same river in the same room – dam, riverbank, desert, swamp — each piece evoking a different era of the riverscape, each connecting past, present, and future through the principle of layered time. In that space, anthropology met art; fieldwork transformed into a collective act of witnessing. People who had never met before stood before the same images and shared stories, anger, and grief. The exhibition opened a public dialogue that no written report could have produced — and in doing so, it extended the river’s own logic: not a single flow but a confluence of voices, layered and simultaneous.

This fieldwork, then, is not a story of loss alone. The river’s receding lines are not only a record of drought. They are a record of a community, and now a public, writing itself against erasure, layer by layer, like watermarks pressed into the earth. The river may be dry. But the lines it leaves behind continue to speak.

Mahroo Movahedi, PhD, is a Swiss-based transdisciplinary researcher and artist whose work explores the intersections of environmental transformation, sensory perception, and society. Drawing on human geography, social anthropology, and artistic research, she investigates how communities perceive, inhabit, and remember landscapes shaped by ecological change.She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Bern, an MA in Transdisciplinary Arts from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and an MA in Fine Arts from the Art University of Isfahan, Iran.

Represented by Galerie Ute Barth and she has extensive experience in academic programme coordination and in curating participatory workshops at the University of Bern. As coordinator of cross-border initiatives such as Art-Science Xplore, she develops collaborative platforms that integrate artistic methodologies with scientific inquiry. Her interdisciplinary research and exhibition projects connect institutions in Zurich, Portugal, and Swiss universities, fostering international collaborations that examine contested landscapes, ecological transformation, and human–environment relationships.

Her research-based artistic practice has been presented at Frictions on Landscapes (Regensburg, 2026), the RAI Film Festival (2023), and Uncommon Senses III (Canada, 2021). Her work on the Chetori project has also been exhibited internationally at philomena+ (Vienna), Galerie Krone (Zurich), and the GPS Space at Le Manoir de la Ville de Martigny (Valais, 2020).

EXHIBITION

Polytemporality — Mahroo Movahedi (mahroo-movahedi.kleio.com)

Frictions on Landscapes — Regensburg (regensburg.de)

REFERENCES

Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., Stain, H., Tonna, A., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry, 15(Suppl.

Casey, E. S. (2004). Public memory in place and time. In K. Phillips (Ed.), Framing public memory (pp. 17–44). University of Alabama Press.

Huyssen, A. (2003). Present pasts: Urban palimpsests and the politics of memory. Stanford University Press.

Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A brief history. Routledge.

Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life (S. Elden & G. Moore, Trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1992)

Massey, D. (2005). For space. SAGE.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)