Urmia Lake
Museum of
Memories
This website would lead to an M.A. final project containing a theoretical paper and also a film about Urmia lake in Urmia, Iran. It is going to survey the interactions between the lake and the people in the area, as well as the consequences of this environmental disaster.
First step would be some observational participatory, doing sensory ethnography. The collected materials would be stored in this website acting as a classified archive including pictures, videos, and also some voices recorded from native people.
About Lake Urmia
Lake Urmia: (Persian: Daryāche-ye Orumiye; Turkish: Urmiya gölü) is an endorheic salt lake in Iran. The lake is between the provinces of East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan in northwest Iran, and west of the southern portion of the Caspian Sea. At its greatest extent, it was the largest lake in the Middle East and the sixth-largest saltwater lake on Earth, with a surface area of approximately 5,200 km2, a length of 140 km, a width of 55 km, and a maximum depth of 16 m. The lake has shrunk to 10% of its former size due to damming of the rivers that flow into it, and the pumping of groundwater from the surrounding area, and also by a 15-km causeway designed to shorten the travel time between the cities of Urmia and Tabriz.
This is mostly due to human activity, with dams and illegal wells impeding the flow of water from the 60 surrounding rivers and streams that feed the lake. These and other developments have caused the salinity of the water to rise significantly, which affects wildlife of all sizes. Migratory birds like flamingos, pelicans, ducks, and egrets no longer frequent the lake, which cannot sustain fish anymore. Even the lake’s native species of brine shrimp, Artemia, which can survive at very high salinity levels, are rumored to have gone extinct.
In 1976, UNESCO designated Lake Urmia a biosphere reserve to encourage sustainable development grounded in community involvement and sound science.
Beside its environmentally importance, there were some jobs, hobbies, and cultures related to the lake when it was alive and nowadays, they are vanishing or changing because of drying. Like local good selling, salt extracting, sailing etc.
The importance of the research is clear, thanks to huge impacts of environmental problem in economical, political and social aspects as well as lifestyle and cultures, which has been changed thoroughly. This requires researches that should have done in advance but has been suspended unfortunately due to political reasons.
140 km
Max. Length
55 km
Max. Width
5,200 km2
Area
16 m
Max. Depth
102
Islands
Artema
Specie
Our Team & Joint Collaborative
Arjang Omrani
SupervisorArjang Omrani was born 1972 in Tehran, Iran. He is a filmmaker and audio-visual anthropologist. His fields of interest include transculturality, audio-visual anthropology, affects and emotions and shared anthropology. Arjang Omrani is a Lecturer at the Institute of Ethnology at the Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität, Münster.
Hadi Javan Roudi
Researcher and Project MangerHadi was born 1982 in Urmia, Iran. He graduated in Philosophy of Art and now doing his second MA. in Visual Anthropology, Media and Documentary practices in Münster, Germany.
Theoretical Background
The theoretical starting step of this study is about the concept of “Dwelling Perspective” which Tim In gold introduced in the article of Temporality of Landscape in the book The Perception of the Environment. By this concept in comparison to building perspective, referred to Martin Heidegger, he means “a perspective that treats the immersion of the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of existence.” He argued that human beings must simultaneously be constituted both as organisms within systems of ecological relations, and as persons within systems of social relations.
So, I want to trace his ideas that lead to invent the term “Tasks cape” which the landscape is the congealed form of the tasks cape does enable us to explain why, intuitively, the landscape seems to be what we see around us, whereas the tasks cape is what we hear. For explaining the differences between these two terms, he shortly says: “what I hear is activity, even when its source cannot be seen. And since the forms of the tasks cape, suspended as they are in movement, are present only as activity, the limits of the tasks cape are also the limits of the auditory world.”
I will use the attitude of Existential Anthropology which introduced by Michael Jackson, talking about lived experience of life and how we can approach more and more to the lives of others and their experiences as they have. For anthropologists, the paradigm of exploring is seeing “life as it was being lived”.
One of the concepts he mentioned and defined in this context is intersubjectivity. He brings: “intersubjectivity may be used of relations between persons and things, since things are often imagined to be social actors, with minds of their own, and persons are often treated as though they were mere things”.
So, it helps me to imply intersubjectivity in my theoretical arguments, on the relation between human and nature or better to say between the people of the area and the lake. Therefore, I am going to assume fundamentally not only all We are the Others, but also, We and Things are same. I can refer to Adorno’s quotation, “neither one can exist without the other”. So, I am going to search about the subjective in-between to clarify how we lost part of ourselves by drying the lake.
Methodology
The method of gathering the raw materials of the thesis is fieldwork. The form of material I am going to need and want to gather in my fieldwork are stories, memories, or folktales they have about lake Urmia; as well as pictures, videos etc. The target group are all the inhabitants of villages near the lake, as well as inhabitants of Urmia city. The language of conversation would be Turkish and Persian. While interviewing, the process would be filmed and their voices would be recorded separately using two DSLR camera and one professional voice recorder.
The website would include three main parts: pictures, videos and voices. It will be a dynamic web that let the other people to participate in the project by uploading materials. Actually, one important part of my purpose in establishing this web project is to digitalize the old pictures of the lake to make a unique archive which can continuously extend. It would be a collaborative project which all can participate by adding their photos, videos, or even articles. Therefore, it is significant to make this archive which could be a practical resource for upcoming researches.
I will make an experimental sensory documentary film on the basis of anthropomorphizing the lake. I assume the lake as a grandmother who is not satisfied with her descendant. Furthermore, I am searching how the lake think about us (the people of Urmia) through reversed ethnography.
In the journey I am going to proceed by camera that I hope to end up with a good film, I want to ascertain myself and lake part of me. To settle, I would mention Grimshaw’s article: “filmmaking as a way of moving through the world, an exploratory process in which knowledge did not exist prior to the encounter between filmmaker, subjects, and the world but was generated in and through these unfolding relationships. At the heart of the new inquiry was a mobile, embodied camera…“
Research Interests
My major enthusiasm to do this research is discovering interactions and two-sided dialogue between people and the lake. This actually going to draw a schema of perceptions which people have about the lake, how they treat the lake as well as the environment in general and how they are influenced by the consequences of the drying lake. In my point of view, there is two-sided relation between people and environment. Whatever you put up with, you end up with.
For the purpose of digging deeply into the cause and effect of this environmental issue, we should go through the people’s perception of environment and their behaviour toward it. So, we can reach to this fact that how do they think and used to think about their circumference and how do they treat it. An effective way of reaching this matter is to explore people’s memories to estimate how do they used to think and act toward their environment.
I think, what is under question is to be responsible to the Other and the nature. How they had been selfish and how different are their behaviour when they act as a single person or as a community. Although there are many reasons for this environmental disaster, but since the mission of this thesis is to surveying the human-environment relationship, the concentration would be on the section mentioned above. I am going to say this is not a dichotomy of two different things that we can put them together to study comparatively, rather, I would say, we use this “human-environment” to be able to talk about different aspects of one thing.
Contact Us
About Lake Urmia
Lake Urmia is an endorheic salt lake in Iran. The lake is located between the provinces of East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan in Iran, and west of the southern portion of the Caspian Sea. At its greatest extent, it was the largest lake in the Middle East and the sixth-largest saltwater lake on Earth.
Locally, the lake is referred to in Persian as Daryāče-ye Orumiye (دریاچهٔ ارومیه), in Azerbaijani as Urmu Gölü, and in Kurdish as Deryaçeya Wirmê. The traditional Armenian name is Kaputan tsov (Կապուտան ծով), literally “blue sea”. Residents of Shahi Island refer to the lake in Azerbaijani as Daryā meaning Sea.
Its Old Persian name was Chichast, meaning “glittering”, a reference to the glittering mineral particles suspended in the water of the lake and found along its shores.[citation needed] In medieval times it came to be known as Lake Spauta or Lake Kabuda (Kabodan) in Armenian geography, from the word for “azure” in Persian, or kapuyt (‘կապույտ’) in Armenian.
140 km
Max. Length
55 km
Max. Width
5,200 km2
Surface area
16 m
Max. Depth
102
Islands
Artemia
Species
