The paper will evolve by the time I deliver it, much like the ever-changing Iranian-revolution, unfolding within-and-outside. As I write, it is just a few days before 22 Bahman, the day commemorating the victory of the 1979-Iranian-Revolution. I am working with these signifiers: Tehran/Lacan/Freedom, which differ somewhat from the Iranian movement woman/life/freedom. Though both movements share freedom, one in psychoanalysis and the analyst’s discourse, and the other in a socially subversive context.

Tehran has acquired a new meaning, an extra “e,” signaling sexual difference, one a European pronunciation and the name of a street in Paris Rue de Téhéran, and the other, where I was born. “Nofeloshato” is a street in downtown Tehran lined with cafés and playhouses, which holds political significance in both Paris and Tehran. While Téhéran is located just off the famous Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris, also known for its historical significance. Of course, the correct spelling of the street in Tehran is Neauphle-le-Château, which is a place outside Paris, where the revolutionary Khomeini was exiled. Yet, the new spelling is something else entirely.

This is my time, the time of Iranian people, my fantasy that is simultaneously about nothing and yet encapsulates decades searching for my missing Other, which lay outside of Tehran, within a little empty swing my grandfather had made, as a way of feeling whole. The incomplete (not-all), and the subversive feminine subjectivity of the women of my city, like Parastoo, who performs a very real concert in a caravanserai despite the masculine possessiveness over what-and-how she sings, these form parallels to the songs we all wish to sing. The songs which operate outside the totalising structures, are infused with a subversive desire, bending these structures into a new order centered on freedom and its traumatic presence, scarf.

In this paper, I explore the emotional and familial crisis that unfolded when my parents, who had faced racial hostility while living in the UK in the early 2000s, returned to visit me during the violent anti-immigrant protests in July 2024. Two decades later, their visit coincided with a violent resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment. The protests were explicitly xenophobic and hostile, triggering a crisis not only within my family but also within my own brown body.

The stories surfacing from immigrants and people of colour across the UK at that time echoed the long-suppressed lived experiences of my parents, forcing us to confront the painful reality that, more than twenty years later, being an immigrant was still seen as a badge of dishonour in the eyes of society. The weight of my parents' silence and fear of racial violence loomed over us, compelling us to finally speak about our brownness, our colonial identity, and the deep-seated shame woven into our collective psyche—conversations we had never had before.

This paper delves into the psychosocial and intergenerational dynamics, focusing on the conversations we had as a family, and how racial and colonial trauma has been passed down through generations in my family. I hope to explore how we continue navigating the socio-political and familial crises by creating space to acknowledge and grieve our past and present. Through this lens, I aim to shed light on the ongoing emotional and physical toll that racialised violence has inflicted on my family, and the complex process of navigating fear, survival, and hope.

The presentation consists of one ( or more) video essays on the subject of migration and refugees. If my space is that of 20 minutes only I will present a short video essay and a short supporting paper - and it woudl be better if there was a possibility of mroe time. My work has always privileged the idea of crossing borders and boundaries of various sorts, whether metaphorical, disciplinary, or physical, drawing also from my own life experiences. The video essay Borders and Refugees crosses multiple boundaries. Inspired by current political events and archival material, the essay reflects on movements across borders and our attitudes towards refugees. In terms of the fundamental research questions, the work juxtaposes the recent photographs and footage of refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border with historical images of Jewish refugees during World War II, drawing striking visual and conceptual parallels. I also wanted to cross various genre and stylistic borders in terms combining found footage with specially short material, particularly, the interview with the acclaimed Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s in which she calls out the difference in treatment of those who are blonde and blue eyed (Ukrainian refugees) and who have been ‘welcomed as brothers in Poland’ (she says) , and those who come from Middle East via the Polish-Belarussian border. The latter are often treated as less than human. In the video essay I incorporated a brief excerpt from her recent film Green Border (2023) which caused a political scandal in Poland when it was first screened. The filmmaker was accused of anti-national sentiments and even threatened with serious legal proceedings, as the representatives of the government accused her of treason. I also experimented with the AI-generated images inspired by archival footage, weaving together historical and contemporary narratives.

Modern power does not rely on primary violence, but on internalized surveillance. Power is more dangerous when it does not declare itself, when it is internalized, naturalized and rendered invisible. This paper, drawn from a novel-in-progress titled FÓVEA, explores inherited trauma and authoritarian legacies, it weaves together fiction, clinical knowledge, and inherited memory. It exposes the hidden mechanics of power tracing how it moves across generations, not through overt force, but through silence, the body, and unspoken laws that govern subjectivity. Focusing on a transgenerational family structure marked by complicity and denial, this paper examines how power reproduces itself via affective attachments and inherited roles. The analysis draws on a clinical and cultural case of a Mexican family with a buried National Socialist past, where the logic of obedience and erasure persists across time. Through a psychoanalytic lens, this paper reframes Lacan’s notion of the gaze as a totalitarian gaze; an internalized surveillance that shapes behaviour not through direct control, but the anticipation of being seen, judged, measured by an unseen authority. Fascism isn't just historical. The fascist gaze does not solely watch, it conditions the subject’s desire, guilt, and silence. What materializes is a figure, a portrait, of domination that is not imposed, but desired. This paper argues that in such structures trauma is not just experienced but it is inherited, encrypted and performed. Power survives not through overt violence but through the compulsion to uphold its illusion.