The idea of moving Iran’s capital has been under discussion since

1989 due to Tehran’s heavy pollution and overcrowding and most of all due to the risk of an earthquake. Tehran lies on a major seismological fault line and experts have long warned that a strong earthquake in the city would be devastating. Numerous fault lines crisscross the city. The dangers are known, but to predict the time of the earthquake remains, as always, impossible. It is believed that it takes 20 to 30 years to gradually move the population out of the capital. The moving of the capital may also be limited to that of the top officials and their security staff, at least in its early phase.

The withdrawal of the governing force from Tehran as the first (and possibly the last) step in moving the capital would not only undermine the city’s geopolitical role on the national and international level, but even the social, economical and urban structure of the city will be destabilized. However more than anything this idea of moving the capital carries with itself, as a

safety measure, the notion of abandonment, an escape from the predicted disaster that may one day take us by surprise.

The citizens of Tehran are faced with a double-edged anticipation: the predicted catastrophe and the proposed preventative measures ie the moving of the capital. They both lack any political, economical and scientific backing for the time and nature of their occurrence. This has developed the abstract notion of predictions (that of the quake), and the fantasy of prevention (in terms of the moving of the capital) into an ever-returning dialectic that is evoked whenever reality comes too close.

The anticipation of the moving of the city of Tehran maybe closer to

reality than the catastrophe that has been predicted for over 20 years. But this is nothing new. Any preventive measure for a predicted catastrophe is meant to take place way before it is too late. The occupation of Iraq by the allies was also a preventive measure to "safeguard the world" from a predicted nuclear catastrophe. What happened was in the end the opposite:

the prevention became the actual catastrophe; the anxiety of a catastrophe is often taken as a pretext for the safeguarding and the re-establishment of positions and ideologies.

What makes a place different is first of all it’s setting

or its mise-en-scène ,that is, the orientations it implies and the subjectivities it entails.

But often, when we think of a particular place in these terms, it is

translated into a location from where stories are transmitted into a locale, where the inhabitants’ roles are interpreted as re-enactments of the play of the space they inhabit. The interpretation of places can develop into strategies for the implementation of

economical, political and ideological change by the state These changes do not necessarily have to be physical to be real.

PAGES proposes the subject of this issue as a project to be developed and followed through into the 3rd issue. The Magazine is open to proposals by artists and writers from Iran and other countries to reflect on the idea of transpositions within locality and location.