Archive Q.0 was a personal performance, in which I presented a fictional archive. The act began as an engagement with theories of archive and repertoire, liveness and the mediatized, but gradually shifted toward a more intimate inquiry into my own positionality as an Iranian theatre practitioner and scholar working at the University of Maryland. Structured as a set of “boxes,” the performance assembled documents, images, and gestures drawn from everyday encounters, historical materials, and circulating media representations, placing them in negotiation with my body and presence as a performer. Through this process, the archive functioned less as a stable repository of knowledge and more as a site of lived tension—between what is known and misunderstood, offered and received, remembered and disappeared. Influenced by thinkers such as Diana Taylor, Philip Auslander, José Esteban Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson, and Dariush Shayegan, the performance invited the audience to actively participate in assembling and patching these fragments together. In doing so, Archive Q.0 proposed identity not as a fixed or bipolar construct, but as a patchwork: an unstable, collective, and continually negotiated process shaped by history, performance, and spectatorship.

Performance's Script:

Walid Raad likes this line:

“how to approach facts not in their crude facticity

But through the mediations by which facts acquire their immediacy”

“Facts appear immediate” - Walid Raad says - “through a set of complex mediations. This question of whether something is fact or fiction is a reduction of the bookends on which we live our lives. We rarely live our lives simply on the edges on this bookends.” Fact -or - fiction “Those bookends, it seems to me, like a false choice to explore the complexity of contemporary life.”

My name is Q-mars Haeri and I’m here to present you UMD Archive Q.0. Although this is an archive, I have found a very intimate relationship with it. It is so personal to me, that I admit, it wouldn’t be an easy platform for us to relate to each other. Maybe sometime soon, we’ll discover another archive, or another way to interact with this archive,  so we can discover our relationship further. Till then, maybe it will look - just like a dream. Or perhaps a troubled sleep. Like a dream of a person who has not slept for the past year. 

Please join me as we will go through the documents in the archive.

This is box no.1 it has more documents than the two other. When I found this box, I started going through them page by page, but what I found was that each time I read a page, the information on the page would dissolve, and disappear. the page would go blank. But, I can partially describe to you what was on the pages. 

Here. Could everyone please pick up two pages? Would you please pass this around?

Please look at the first page. And put your attention onto it. 

The page you are looking at, is a full page, double spaced, with 250 words on it. Times new roman, 12 points. It is about a dark reality. It is about a horrid event. It only happened not because it should have, not because it was right, but because history tells us it did. Think about it. Think about an event, an event that you know of, in your hometown perhaps, in somewhere you know perhaps, in the history you know perhaps, a horrid event that you know. Think about the event that you know, the event that is written about in those pages. What is it? Let’s read it carefully and quietly in our own minds. Sentence by sentence. Word by word. Letter by letter. Let’s focus and read for another ten seconds

Ten - nine - eight - seven - six - five - four - three - two - one 

Let’s turn the page. Let’s go to page two

Please look at the second page. It is written in the same style, same margins, same font, same size. The person who has written this information, on this page, was a hopeful person, a person who believed in change, a scholar perhaps. The person has written about why that horrid event has happened. The person hopes that by knowing the event in great detail, they would be able to prevent it from happening again. 

This second page went blank very quickly for me. And I can only remember two words, one that started with an “R” and one that ended with an “R”.

Whenever you felt like it, please lay the papers down on the table at the center, next to each other. 

There were several other documents that turned into blank. I remembered them vaguely.

But after all of these, There was one particular document. One that did not dissolve, did not disappear, One that transmitted its information, its knowledge to me. And when I saw it, I was shocked. (show document) I asked myself why this particular image? Between so many others? Does it have to do something with the person? Who is originally a Parsi from Zanzibar? A persian perhaps? Does it have something to do with the gesture? With the body? Does it have something to do with the document itself? Its color? Its ink? Its paper? I was so confused.

This box no. 2 is the one that I’ve come here to study. It is a set of photos of the Laleh Zar theatre district in Tehran. The Street, the plays, Sa’adi theatre, Tehran theatre, Nasr Theatre, Pars theatre, Dehghan theatre, the statues, the trees, (turn to Statue of Liberty) mount Damavand, Friday’s sunsets, New Year Cookies, Rose water, uhhhhhh.  When I’m around this box, I should feel free. I should feel liberated. I feel free to be bounded to this box. The Archive wants me to be here. It sets me free here, and only here.

Box three, is the box that we all know the documents, We know them, but haven’t seen them. There is a set of photos here, that are numbered and not named. Photo number ten, photo number nine, photo number eight, photo number, seven, photo number six, photo number five, photo number four, photo number three, photo number two, photo number one.

I have to say, photo number one is exactly like the others, but it has a sense of familiarity. It is like something I’ve seen. Something I’ve known. Maybe it is just the number, 

Many years ago, in my country, in the coldest winters, people would put their unwanted cloths next to each other, and patch them together. (give out the patch work) They would make a very big patchwork, a crazy quilt, to save themselves from the cold. 

Some years ago, the Iranian philosopher, Dariush Shayegan, has used the analogy of a crazy quilt to describe our identity. A kind of identity that has passed the bipolar equations: us and them, north and south, the west and the east. (pose) An identity of a crazy quilt.

(Raise the patchwork) All of this archive, it seems to me, like a troubled sleep, or perhaps like a dream. Dream of a person who has not slept for the past year. A person who need the sleep. A sleep under this crazy quilt.