Why Setareh Heshmat Spent Two Years Collecting Forgotten Persian Stories From Around the World

There is a particular kind of loss that has no name in English. It is the feeling of watching a culture thin out across generations — stories told less frequently, languages spoken with increasing hesitation, rituals quietly abandoned in the effort to belong somewhere new. Setareh Heshmat knows this feeling well. It is what sent her, over the course of two years, across digital borders and time zones, into the living rooms and memories of Persian immigrants scattered across twenty countries.

What began as a personal inquiry became something far larger: a structured archive of voices, images, and testimonies that Heshmat has spent years collecting, translating into art, and preserving through digital media. She calls it a labour of listening.

The Project Takes Shape

The initiative was not born from a formal institution or an academic grant. It grew from a private restlessness — a sense that the Persian stories most worth keeping were precisely the ones at risk of disappearing. Heshmat began reaching out to Iranian diaspora communities in countries as geographically distant as Brazil, Sweden, Japan, and Canada. Her method was simple: she asked people to speak. About their first memory of leaving. About what they carried with them and what they left behind. About the Persian words their children no longer understand.

Each interview was conducted with care, treated not as data collection but as an act of witness. Heshmat listened, recorded, and then returned to her studio — where the stories became something visual.

Art as Archive

For Heshmat, the translation from spoken word to image is not decorative. It is documentary. Each visual work produced from the project carries within it a specific story, a specific life. A fragment of handwritten Farsi embedded in layered pigment. A geometric pattern interrupted mid-sequence, mirroring a cultural practice disrupted by migration. Colours drawn from the landscapes people described leaving — the particular ochre of a Isfahan afternoon, the deep blue of the Caspian in winter.

The result is an archive that operates on two levels simultaneously: as a searchable digital record of testimonies, and as a body of visual art that makes those testimonies felt rather than merely read.

Twenty Countries, One Thread

What surprised Heshmat most was not the diversity of the stories she gathered — it was the consistency of a single thread running through all of them. Regardless of whether her subject had left Iran decades ago or only recently, regardless of whether they had settled into their new country with ease or continued to feel like guests, almost every person described the same quiet grief: the fear that their Persian identity would not survive them.

This was not expressed dramatically. It surfaced in small observations. A grandmother who stopped cooking Persian food because her grandchildren showed no interest. A father who gave his children Western names to protect them from discrimination. A poet who wrote in Farsi for thirty years and then, one day, stopped — because there was no longer anyone in his immediate world who could read him.

Preservation as Resistance

Heshmat frames the archive not simply as preservation but as a form of resistance. In her view, the act of recording a story that the world was prepared to let fade is a political act, even when it feels intimate. The Persian diaspora is large, educated, and globally distributed — and yet its internal cultural record remains fragmented, scattered across private memories and family photographs that rarely make it into any formal institution.

Her project pushes against that fragmentation. By combining the rigour of oral history methodology with the expressive reach of visual art and the accessibility of digital media, she has created something that neither discipline could achieve alone.

What Comes Next

The archive continues to grow. Heshmat has indicated that she intends to expand the project into a travelling exhibition, bringing the visual works and accompanying testimonies to cities with significant Persian diaspora populations. She is also exploring partnerships with cultural institutions interested in hosting the digital component as a publicly accessible resource.

For Heshmat, the work is far from finished. As long as there are Persian stories at risk of being forgotten, she considers the archive open.

The stories she has collected do not belong to her. She is simply the person who asked, and listened, and refused to let them go.