In an age that rewards constant connectivity, Setareh Heshmat does something increasingly radical. Once a month, she disappears.
Not literally — but effectively. For one weekend every month, Heshmat disconnects entirely from technology. No phone, no email, no social media, no digital tools of any kind. What she enters instead is a private creative space she has maintained for years: a weekend of silence, poetry, and visual journaling that she credits as the source of her most powerful and emotionally resonant work.
It is a ritual that sits quietly behind a public profile built on professional achievement and intellectual rigour. And it is, she has suggested, the part of her practice she guards most carefully.
Where the Ritual Begins
The preparation starts before the weekend itself. In the days leading up to her monthly retreat, Heshmat selects a piece of classical Persian poetry — drawn from figures such as Hafez, Rumi, or Forough Farrokhzad — and sits with it. She does not analyse it immediately. She allows it to settle, the way one allows a difficult piece of music to move through the body before attempting to understand it intellectually.
By the time the weekend arrives, the poem has already begun doing its work. It has surfaced memories, associations, images — fragments of the migration stories she has gathered over years of listening to Persian communities across the world. These fragments arrive uninvited and unordered. That, for Heshmat, is precisely the point.
The Visual Journal as Primary Form
During the disconnected weekend, Heshmat works exclusively in physical media. Paper, ink, pigment, found materials. The visual journal she produces across these two days is not a sketchbook in the conventional sense — it is not preparatory work for a larger piece. It is the work itself.
Each journal entry begins with a line or image from the selected poem, handwritten or drawn directly onto the page. What follows is not illustration but response — a visual conversation with the text that draws equally on ancient Persian aesthetics and the contemporary realities of displacement, exile, and cultural survival.
A recurring formal element in these journals is interruption. Patterns that begin with the geometric precision of traditional Persian design and then fracture mid-sequence. Calligraphic marks that dissolve before completion. Borders that do not close. These are not accidental choices — they are visual analogues for the experience of migration itself: a culture mid-sentence, a tradition reaching across distance for something it can almost touch.
Why Disconnection Is Non-Negotiable
Heshmat has spoken about the relationship between digital noise and creative depth with considerable clarity. The internet, in her view, does not simply distract — it flattens. It produces a particular kind of mental surface that makes certain kinds of thinking difficult to access. The grief embedded in a line of Hafez, or the specific texture of longing described by an Iranian grandmother she once interviewed in Stockholm, requires a quality of attention that cannot coexist with notifications.
The monthly retreat enforces that attention by removing its competition entirely. There is nothing to check, nothing to respond to, nothing arriving from the outside world. What remains is the poem, the materials, and whatever the combination of the two manages to surface.
Modern Migration, Ancient Form
What makes the resulting work distinctive is the tension it holds between two seemingly incompatible registers. The formal vocabulary Heshmat draws on — Persian geometric patterning, classical calligraphic tradition, the visual grammar of illuminated manuscripts — carries within it centuries of accumulated meaning. Placed alongside imagery drawn from contemporary migration: bureaucratic forms, border crossings, the anonymous architecture of airports and transit spaces, that ancient formal vocabulary becomes something new. It does not comment on the present from a distance. It inhabits it.
This is the synthesis that the monthly ritual makes possible. The disconnection from technology is not nostalgia. It is a method for holding both worlds — the ancient and the immediate — in the same creative space, without allowing either to overwhelm the other.
The Work That Emerges
Not every weekend produces something Heshmat considers finished. Some journals remain private, working documents she returns to months later when a particular image or mark becomes relevant to a larger piece. Others have formed the direct basis for exhibited works — pieces that carry within them the specific poem that initiated them and the specific migration story that shaped their visual form.
The audience rarely knows this origin. But Heshmat believes it is felt. There is a difference, she has indicated, between work that is constructed and work that is excavated. The monthly ritual is, above all else, an excavation — a deliberate descent into material that the pace of ordinary life does not allow.
In a professional world that increasingly values speed, scale, and digital fluency, Setareh Heshmat’s most powerful creative act may simply be the discipline to stop — and to insist, once a month, on slowness.
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