gashtgari is a farsi term for 'tourism' which exists exclusively in bilingual dictionaries.

gashtgari was a collaboration between two people with different backgrounds and intellectual agendas, one of whom lived in geneva, the other in tehran. the different contributions on behalf of the two collaborators can easily be discerned as such. andrew's field are the visual arts. his part in the project concerns the entire architecture of the site, from the graphic design to the conceptual framework. tirdad moved from geneva to tehran in november 1999, and has been sending snapshots of tehran's public spaces via the net. andrew used the shots and the occasional explanatory comments for the site. what is generally to be seen of the photos are random pieces of any given shot as it was originally intended to be shown, with the visitors having to work their way through the site's constraints to get a more complete picture. thanks to the constant struggle for a less frustrating view, it should be hard to succumb to the impression that one has been offered a window unto tehran. it would in any case be difficult to do justice to tehran. for one thing, the violence (symbolic and physical) that helps define urban spaces anywhere, but also the tenacity with which it is repeatedly resisted or bypassed, both take on extreme proportions in tehran. for another thing, with the rate of periurbanisation quickly making tehran one of the largest cities worldwide (it is already the most polluted), it's a very extreme case of what is generally happening to most metropoles around the world. yet another complication is the fact that rarely has a place that has as much to offer been so completely unknown to the outside world.