Radio Khiaban, is an online platform and podcast dedicated to women in Iran reclaiming public spaces, through feminist interventions of singing, and other transgressive acts in public spaces. 

The project aims to address the spatial discriminations, endemic to patriarchal societies everywhere: the policing of women’s voices and bodies, and their disenfranchisement from public space. How, silenced and constrained, women must creatively navigate the same streets that men easily move through.

Each episode of the podcast focuses on one aspect of gendered bodies and spatial inequality: the performances that are considered taboo or there is controversy around them in public by women, as well as places that restrict women by segregating them, or from entering them all together. Each episode has a special guest participant: a female singer who chooses a public space in which she sings and then she reflects on her bodily experience of the site-specific performance. Other participants and guests of each episode reflect on the specific topic of that episode. 

Saba Zavarei, the founder weaves these stories together with the histories of women’s struggles in public space around the world, to paint a holistic picture. The platform shapes a participatory and socially-engaged art practice where participants create their own feminist intervention acts under the guidance and interaction with Radio Khiaban’s team. Eventually all these actions are published through the podcast, website and other channels of the project. It aims at empowering women to reclaim the everyday spaces through creative tactics of quotidian life, to challenge the patriarchal norms and bring about change through their alternative performances. 

Radio Khiaban was born out of the practice side of Saba Zavarei’s PhD (2021) in performance studies and human geography at Goldsmiths, University of London and has become a collective project that has been displayed at art festivals, and public talks and presentations.