“This photo is from my series
Scattered Memories of a Distorted Future
, which I made in 2021. The previous year, after the crash of the Ukrainian plane in Tehran and the period of confinement, I was, like a large part of the Iranian population, completely depressed by the atmosphere and news from my country.
Everything seemed to me in ruins, and I constructed this work as a metaphor for pain.
Via social networks, I contacted painters to offer them to make a work on ruined walls, which I will then photograph.
Each chose their subject.
I knew that the work of Soudeh Davoud, who is Kurdish, like Mahsa Amini, and who is seen in the image, carried the voice of women who never stopped protesting.
We met in the summer of 2021, at the same time as we visited this abandoned building in Tehran.
On the third or fourth floor, there was this perspective with a street, which you can see through the window, and the wall where Soudeh painted this fresco in one day.
She painted the faces of the women who demonstrated in this same street for the first time, on March 8, 1979, against the veil that Ayatollah Khomeini had just declared compulsory the day before.
"History is repeating itself in Iran," explains Soudeh Davoud.
The main subject of my work is women and their social position, in the region where they live… And for years, I have been working on projects around their right to clothing freedom.
The women I have represented are from a generation that is ignored and disillusioned, but which has produced girls capable of making their voices heard by the whole world.
In the picture, I pose as a witness,
with the Kurdish scarf resting on my loose hair…” “Before this project, concludes Maryam, I thought of women inside a world in ruins.
Now I understood that they were the roots of everything that happens.
As zan – woman – is, in our language, the root of zendagi – life.
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