Amin Yousefi Turns a War Textbook Into an Archive of Body Politics

Amin Yousefi has won the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2026, and his winning project takes aim at a textbook. Defensive Readiness: Revised Edition reworks a manual once handed to Iranian high-school students, and it opens at C/O Berlin's Amerika Haus on 13 February 2027, running to 02 June.

Yousefi was born in 1996 in Abadan, Iran. He holds an MA in photography from the University of Westminster and lives in London. His work has shown at Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen and Ag Galerie in Tehran, and in 2026 he published the photobook Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth with Luhz Press.

What does the textbook actually teach?

"When I began working with the Defensive Readiness textbook, I wasn't approaching it as a historical document," Yousefi said. "It functions more as a manual that trains bodies into legibility. Introduced to students at around 15, it teaches how to stand, aim, rescue and respond to threat."

The manual, he argues, produces a disciplined subject. Readiness becomes a form of citizenship. Physical comportment becomes ideology. The ideal citizen it imagines isn't heroic; he is, in Yousefi's words, "repeatable, measurable and ready for activation".

How do you intervene in an instruction manual?

On two levels. The first is reproduction and annotation. Yousefi reworked selected pages with corrections, darkroom-style markings and handwritten notes, imagining the material before it reached the classroom. The result looks clinical, even procedural, and that's the point: institutional power, he says, often operates through forms that resemble care. The body is measured, corrected, stabilised, made compliant.

The second intervention is performative. Yousefi re-enacted the manual's poses with his own body and translated them into three-dimensional scans (volumetric digital records rather than flat photographs). "By annotating the textbook and then restaging its images with my own body, I moved from reader to participant," he said. "That shift changed how I understood institutional images. It changed it from evidence into an apparatus."

The scans expose what the diagrams suppress: weight, strain, micro-adjustments, the constant instability of balance. Even the original photographs show ordinary bodies, not trained soldiers, with small inconsistencies in posture and coordination. Figures that look stable in print turn fragile when enacted.

Who owns a found image?

Yousefi treats authorship as a live question. Annotation, sequencing and re-enactment "are not neutral acts; they alter the conditions under which these images are read". He resists the idea that reinterpretation can overwrite what's already there. In his previous project he worked with photographs by Michel Setboun, who described images as 'the raw material… the fertile ground for a new story'.

The textbook, produced after a period of war, still carries its logic through education and posture. What becomes visible, Yousefi says, is "not a single event, but a continuity of instruction that moves through the body".

Readers can hear him discuss Eyes Dazzle as They Search for the Truth with the photographer and long-time collaborator David Campany at Ibraaz in London on Thursday 05 November 2026. Berlin gets the drills two months later.