“Melli”* – for me, the starting point is precisely this distance between name and destiny; between what we write on a thing and what, in the real world, actually happens to it.
Melli Shoes was founded in 1957 by Mohammad Rahim Motaghi Ervani, an entrepreneur who, after a trip to Czechoslovakia, brought two specialists and an autoclave back to Iran and started production with around thirty-five workers. A few decades later, this small nucleus had turned into an industrial empire with more than fifty-two factories, over four hundred shops across Iran and thousands of workers – a complex whose products were exported to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and even Western Europe.
What interests me, however, is not only this narrative of industrial growth, but the way this whole experience became knotted around the word melli – the Persian term for “national”, saturated in Iran with the rhetoric of state projects and public ownership. This name tied Melli Shoes to the project of nation-building and to the official narrative of “development”: an extension of the same discourse that had celebrated the “nationalisation” of oil and was now placing the “nationalisation of shoes” on the feet of the everyday citizen. On a symbolic level, wearing Melli Shoes meant participating in the dream of a modern, industrial Iran; a body that wore these shoes and “walked the path of development” stepped away from the logic of the neighbourhood cobbler and the traditional guild order, and drew closer to the body of the industrial citizen.
After the 1979 Revolution, this same company – together with dozens of affiliated firms – was expropriated, handed over to the National Industries Organisation, and later, to settle government debts, transferred to the Civil Servants Pension Fund. Most of the machinery was sold off, and the vast Mehrabad factory was reduced to an “industrial park” and a row of warehouses. From my point of view, this was not merely a change of ownership; it was the replacement of one language with another: the discourse of “national industrial capital” gave way to a discourse of “seizure in the name of the downtrodden”.
In all of this, the word itself, written on the sign, has become the focal point for me. Melli is a word that has been repeated on shopfronts, on factory walls and across the body of the city, yet the fate of Melli Shoes shows how this very word slowly empties out and turns into a cover for the concentration of power. What begins in the realm of individual effort and creativity is transformed, in official language, into a “national achievement” and, ultimately – under the slogan of “belonging to everyone” – is handed over to abstract, faceless institutions: the state, organisations, funds. Melli becomes a pretext for separating ownership and responsibility from the concrete faces of real people, dissolving them into the fog of general concepts; what is declared “national” is, in practice, transferred into the sacred, untouchable domain of power and control.
*Note on “melli” for non-Persian readers: I have kept the Persian word melli alongside “national” because, in Iran, it carries a dense historical charge – from “National Oil” to “National Shoes” – where the line between “of the people” and “of the state” is always unstable.
Photographs | HD Inkjet Print on Archival Acid Free Paper | Each Pieces 30×30 cm | 2022.