*Faghan

Daughters of Afghanistan

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban reconquered Afghanistan after twenty years of Western military presence, once again establishing a religious dictatorship. The country sanctioned a chaos of violence, extreme poverty, and human rights violations. The Taliban established a gender apartheid that segregated women within the home, prohibiting them from studying beyond the age of 12, working outside the home, or going to gyms, parks, or beauty salons. In public, women were forbidden to show their faces, or even make their voices heard.

For Afghan women, the only choice was between social death and fleeing abroad.

The 19 women featured in this exhibition managed to escape and now live in Italy as refugees. Their stories show us dynamic and project-filled lives before the Taliban returned to power: university students, humanitarian workers, tour guides, sports champions, women's rights activists... Until their anguished escape, in the turbulent days of 2021 when they watched their dreams crumble, forced to abandon a land that, despite everything, they continue to love with deep nostalgia.

These 19 protagonists were involved by Nove Onlus in a project on the reappropriation of their identity, inspired by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union; in a short film that, with interviews and exclusive videos of the capture of Kabul in 2021, delves into the stories of 5 of them; and in this exhibition, whose posed portraits express the newfound freedom to exhibit their beauty. A beauty that is not simple vanity, but rather a concrete possibility of existing.

In Afghanistan, with the seizure of power by the Taliban, women disappeared from public life and, consequently, from photographs as early as 1996. The absence of female figures in the photographic archives dramatically highlights a condition of segregation, which means exclusion from history. The beauty of the portraits on display therefore reveals a reaction to the violence suffered, thanks to the freedom to invite the gaze of others to rest on their faces again.

In photographing these women, Simona Ghizzoni imagined giving them back the opportunity, for years exclusively male, to enter a photography studio for the pure pleasure of being portrayed: the women put on makeup, dressed and combed their hair independently, as they used to do before the Taliban censorship, to offer the lens their most authentic representation. And to proudly oppose the regime that attempted to annihilate them, forcing them to choose between life in their native country and the reappropriation of their fundamental rights.

These glances and these testimonies speak on behalf of all Afghan women. Finally proposing a reflection, empathetic and universal, on the condition of all refugees.

Emanuela Zuccalà

*In the Dari language, “faghan” is a moan, a cry of pain. From a verse of Daughter of Afghanistan by the poet Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005), beaten to death by her husband who could not tolerate her independence as a woman and an established intellectual

Credit:

Photographs by Simona Ghizzoni

Texts and videos by Emanuela Zuccalà

Edited by Giulia Tornari

The exhibition is part of the project "Our rights: from the denial to the acquisition of rights for Afghan women" created by Nove Caring Humans and Zona.

Project funded by ActionAid International Italia E.T.S and Fondazione Realizza il Cambiamento as part of the project “The CARE - Civil Actors for Rights and Empowerment” co-financed by the European Union.

Officine fotografiche, via G.Libetta,1 Rome

18 October at 6:30 pm inauguration

19 October – 16 November