Dylan Thomas in Iran: Reframing colonial oil industry archive imagery

Join filmmaker Nariman Massoumi and archivist and researcher Rosa Méthol for a collaborative workshop exploring colonial-era oil company photographs and their legacies. Using images featured in his short documentary Pouring Water on Troubled Oil (2023, 26 min), which retraces poet Dylan Thomas’s 1951 journey through Iran, participants will rework these photographs through creative exercises with fragments of text and media

Together we’ll question what the images reveal and conceal, and explore how they can be reused and reimagined as living records of history. We’ll also consider how the images interact with Thomas’s writing and with sound in the film, which will be screened as part of the workshop. Open to all and/or artists, researchers, community members, or simply anyone curious about rethinking the visual archives and histories of colonialism and oil.

Lunch will be provided at 1pm.

This event is part of Being Human Festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities, taking place 6 - 15 November 2025. Led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, with generous support from Research England, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy. For further information please see beinghumanfestival.org.