Piecing together the destroyed and lost archives of the Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis (1967-1977)
Archaeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD) has painstakingly retrieved the history of the Festival of Arts since 2008. The process has involved piecing together the archives, which remain missing and banned in Iran. The festival was condemned by a religious fatwa in 1977 and all documentation associated with it were removed from public access; they were partially destroyed and otherwise remain inaccessible in Iran. Those archives included a comprehensive collection of audio and video recordings which has been documented by the National Iranian Radio and Television (NIRT) between 1967 and 1977.
AOTFD’s mission has been to recover the documents and archives and piece together the puzzle of information around the festival. In doing so, we aim to recover, document, digitise and disseminate the history of those events and to critically evaluate the landscape and artistic genealogies of the festival.
