White flags on monuments: with his photomontages, an Iranian architect responds to Donald Trump

White flags on Iran’s major monuments: the universal symbol of surrender soars over Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the ziggurats of Choqa zanbil, the tomb of poet Hafez, the ruins of Pasargade, and the rock reliefs of Taq-e Bostan. They are just photomontages, but they want to make themselves the bearers of a message of peace: this is the meaning of Peace, the project of Iranian architect Mohammad Hassan Forouzanfar, who chose Instagram to spread his creations, which have collected the “likes” of more than ten thousand users from all over the world.

The project was born in the wake of threats by U.S. President Donald Trump, who declared last Jan. 4 that the U.S. was ready to strike 52 targets in Iran, including some important to the country’s culture. Statements later diluted (partly because deliberately striking cultural sites is a war crime under international conventions), while meanwhile today comes some tentative evidence of détente from the US. Forouzanfar’s project was launched three days ago, a few hours after Trump’s statements, and made the rounds around the web, worldwide, in a few days.

“Iran,” Forouzanfar wrote in the post with which he shared the project, “has a liquid culture,” a liquidity that has seen “the Roman army, the Mongols, the Persians, religions and different cultures” pass through there. All those who have passed through have left a mark: sites “can be destroyed with cannons and tanks,” Forouzanfar wrote, “but culture cannot be destroyed,” because “being Iranian is in our collective memory, in our language and literature, in our way of thinking, in our outlook and attitude, in our way of being happy and in our way of crying.”

To see Forouzanfar’s photomontages just log on to his Instagram account.

Pictured: the photomontage with Naqsh-e Jahan Square over which the white flag flies.

White flags on monuments: with his photomontages, an Iranian architect responds to Donald Trump

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