“Speak The Wind” is Hoda Afshar photographic research on the Iranian belief that the winds can possess people, causing illness and disease. The islands in the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, and their inhabitants are the inspiration and living matter of Afshar’s investigation, all visible traces of a withering spoken history which tells of an ancient cult. Indeed, this conviction of a spirit possession that causes illness – namely ‘zār’, the ‘harmful wind’ – originated in Northern and Eastern Africa and was transported to some countries of the Middle East, such as Iran, through slavery (Mianji and Semnani 2015).
Afshar’s images well depict the effects of the cultural belief of the spirit possession: acting as an anthropologist, she indeed presents an accurate visual study on how the people and nature are moulded by the wind, and how the invisible spirit manifests in every form it touches and breathes through. Every living thing is connected, and so suggests the structure of the book, where the colour and black-and-white images articulate and fluidly interconnects at the crossroad of reality and fiction, so the generative making of imagined realities (from past participle stem of the Latin word fingere, to touch, form or model). Images are by nature appearances, projecting things that have happened or imagined as if they were optically perceptible, so there should be no surprise in finding Afhsar’s narration a magical one, if not for the tendency of her images to activate a kind of belief among the spectators towards a supernatural spirit possession that could be explained by colonial psychiatry as a culture-bound mental illness.