Sholeh Asgary | Breathing Water Across the Landscape

The Qanat is life giving. Originating 3,000 years ago in Iran, the qanat—which goes by other names across the wider region—is among the most ancient ways humans have moved water across arid environments. Created by tunneling beneath a system of wells from aquifer to outlet, these underground waterways made sustaining larger populations and cultivation of crops possible.

The job of tunneling qanats is poorly paid and dangerous. The lack of oxygen from the collapse of the earth, flooding, and the presence of gasses is deadly. Those who do the labor call qanats by another name, ghatel, meaning “murderer.”

Ghatel is a series of speculative topographical maps of qanats by artist Sholeh Asgary. While doing her research, Asgary learned that her grandfather was a digger, and at times, her father would join him at work.

It is an intergenerational labor; one knows they will never 
see the fruits of their labor in their lifetime, but they do so for future generations. 
This skill and the qanats are dying out, and with it, so is an intergenerational relationship with time.

The layers of importance and danger of this essential labor are woven into the meaning and making of Asgary’s work, into her very breath.

What's really marvelous about them is how we locate them. 
Typically, the way to do this is by locating an alluvial fan in a landscape.

Asgary’s speculative maps begin with a breath. The artist breathes into plaster, creating a crater. She then pours the plastic of melted disposable water bottles into the mark of her breath to create a mold. The water bottles the artist uses are themselves a way to move water across the landscape; problematic in their own right, the bottles are symbolic of the ownership of natural resources, of the space taken up in the landfill, of the only potable water available in some areas due to contamination through human activity.

The qanat can be sited by locating alluvial fans in the landscape. Asgary scoured satellite images of Iran on Google Earth, and through cartographic interpretations, she intuitively disperses the plastic casts of her breath and embosses the paper. Because the maps are monochromatic, the topography is difficult to read when looking head-on. It takes angled lighting, care, and time to find these scars made in the paper. 

While these maps depict a speculative landscape, they also reference the body where the network of craters becomes scars. This connection between body and land is apt, as breath—used to make the maps—is as necessary for life as the water that flows through the qanat.