“When the House Burns Down” is a collective of academics, artists, and practitioners committed to producing counter-knowledge on Iran.

We emerge from a moment of catastrophe: amid the January 2026 massacre, enforced silence, and the systematic destruction of life by Iran’s theocratic regime. We recognise this moment as one that carries the recollection of 47 years of the Iranian struggle, most recently the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, while simultaneously acting as a moment of departure and expansion.

We stand against a global discourse that repeatedly denies Iranians political agency by collapsing their struggles into geopolitics. We reject frameworks that reduce middle- and working-class resistance to Western interference, and we refuse the moral evasions of imperial liberalism and campist leftism alike.

Our work begins from within the house, the streets and cemeteries: from turning the house into refuge, mourning to dance, and everyday survival to revolt. Our point of departure is not abstraction, but bodies: thousands of bodies walking, running, falling and dying together, bodies in plastic bags piled on the ground; bodies in detention centres, hospitals, and morgues; bodies in unmarked graves; bodies disciplined, disappeared, and made disposable.

Our mode of engagement is oblique: we enter knowledge, critique and solidarity from within lived conditions rather than through the authoritative frames of nation, geopolitics or abstract universals. This sideways entry refuses fixed positions and exhausted logics, opening space for relational forms of understanding grounded in implication, proximity and shared risk. We do not speak in one language, nor do we seek unity through sameness. Our position is fluid, relational, and unfinished. We inhabit the in-between — resisting binaries, refusing totalising frameworks that flatten difference and demand coherence at the expense of bodies, voices, and lived experiences.

Borrowing from Giorgio Agamben, we take the burning house as a way into the heart of the political crisis of our time, within and beyond Iran: inhabiting the world under regimes that govern through death. The burning house appears as both exposure and opportunity. A moment that reveals how the management of bare life has become a dominant political logic, and how the attempt to govern life itself has slid into madness.

When the house burns down, neutrality is impossible. This collective exists to think, write, make, and intervene from inside the fire. We amplify lived struggle, insisting on dignity, and refusing the erasure of violence through abstraction.