In the following text, I endeavour to argue for microhistory in artistic practice in relation to politics from three perspectives: individual, structural and artistic. In the third and final part of the text, I bring together parts one and two and discuss how they play out in the filmmaker, photographer and writer Pirooz Kalantari’s films.

The first section begins with how I first encountered the concept of microhistory – a combination of words that caught my interest. It presents microhistory from the perspective of the individual in accordance with the microhistorical method of investigation1. In other words, I aim to argue from my individual political and social agency and explain the understanding of the concept of microhistory from the perspective of an Iranian artist from Tehran who works in Stockholm.

In the second part of the text I will present my individualized understanding of microhistory in relation to the theories of microhistory as formulated by Carlo Ginzburg (1993), as a vital aspect of microhistorical narrativity in relation to macrohistory. I challenge and reject the notion that microhistory should be regarded as the branches of the macrohistorical tree trunk. Instead, I perceive it as “elseness” and attempt to explain the invisibility and hiddenness of the macrohistory as a doxa, or a part of habitual everyday life that eludes identification.

The third part of my text approaches microhistory in an Iranian context and elaborates this relationship and the necessity of microhistorical narrativity in the hyper-politicized time, place and body in Pirooz Kalantari’s films.