Repair Is Never Neutral: Politics, Narrative, and the Dutch Reconstruction of Dousadj
Elham Ahmadi
Antwerp, Belgium
About
I am a graphic designer, visual artist, and artist-researcher from Iran, currently based in Belgium. Over the past few years, my work has focused on themes of repair, the politics of repair, narration, archives, and memory. My current artistic research and practice examine repair and the politics and narratives embedded in its archives through the Dutch reconstruction of Dousadj, a village in northern Iran that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1962 and later rebuilt through a project led by the European Working Group (EWG). Since the reconstruction, homes in Dousadj have continued to be repaired by local villagers to be made livable on their own terms. My practice asks how repair can be read politically, and how artistic work can intervene in what the archive recorded, made visible, or left out.
Project
Repair is where care, power, memory, and authorship meet. Grounded in Dousadj, the project follows a post-earthquake reconstruction remembered as Dutch, but lived, altered, and carried by the village itself. Using cross-stitch on photographs alongside redesigned objects, the installation turns archival material into a site of intervention. Repair becomes a way to read what the archive keeps visible, and what it leaves behind.
