The 19 women protagonists of the exhibition “Faghan. Daughters of Afghanistan”, ongoing in Rome until November 16th at the Officine Fotografie, managed to escape from the hell of the Taliban and today live in Italy as refugees. Their stories, merged into beautiful photographs and an unpublished documentary film, give us dynamic lives full of projects, before the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, erasing all their rights: they were university students, humanitarian workers, tourist guides, sports champions, women’s rights activists. Three years ago they were forced into an agonizing escape, seeing their dreams crumble, forced to abandon a land that, despite everything, they continue to love with profound nostalgia. At this point for the Afghan women, the only choice was – and still is – between social death and fleeing abroad.
“Now I live in Italy where I can enjoy fundamental human rights: I have freedom of expression, the freedom to choose what to do, what to study, what job to undertake, how to live. Then I think: but why can’t I enjoy these rights at home, in my country, with my family? Why am I here in Italy today? Why did I have to become a refugee, to enjoy these rights?”, asks Mahdia, 19 years old, former national Taekwondo champion in Afghanistan, now part of the refugee Olympic team, student and activist.
Meanwhile in Kabul the situation has worsened further: the latest laws passed by the Taliban prohibit women from showing themselves in public, from traveling alone, even from making their voices heard, after having already closed the doors of schools, universities and beauty institutes to them. , gyms, denying her a walk in the park or even going to work. “In reality, Afghanistan was a very cheerful, happy country, a country of socialisation, music and art, an expression of life and colour. The idea was to tell everyone about it through these Afghan refugees who have been reinventing their lives in Italy for three years. With this photographic exhibition and the documentary we wanted to give back their voices and faces, give them back their physicality and dignity“, said at the vernissage Flavia Mariani, communications manager of Nove Caring Humans, one of the few Italian NGOs still operating in Afghanistan with a series of projects to support women heads of families, children and disabled people struggling with a serious economic and humanitarian emergency.
The photographic exhibition, with shots by Simona Ghizzoni, and the unpublished documentary by Emanuela Zuccalà are part of the project “Our rights: from the denial to the acquisition of rights for Afghan women”, created by Nove Caring Humans and the Zona agency The objective is also to promote awareness of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union among the Afghan refugee women in Italy, to underline its importance through the testimonies of those who have been denied them participated in a series of listening and discussion workshops on the topic, organized by the Roman NGO, and at the same time were involved by Zona as protagonists of a photographic set and of the documentary. The entire process was financed by ActionAid International Italia ETS and by Make the Change Foundation as part of the project The Care – Civil Actors for Rights and Empowerment, co-funded by the European Union. In photographing these women, Simona Ghizzoni imagined giving them back the possibilitywhich in Afghanistan is exclusively male, to enter a photography studio for the pure pleasure of having their portrait taken. The women did their makeup, clothes and hair independently, as they used to do before Taliban censorship, to offer the camera their most authentic representation. “In consulting first-hand sources on studio photography in Afghanistan, I realized that from the first Taliban regime in the 1990s onwards, there was no longer any trace of women. This is a bad signal, an indicator of the fact that they are being canceled and their rights along with them, effectively becoming socially invisible,” reported Ghizzoni.
Accompanying the photographs is a short film directed by Emanuela Zuccalà which, with interviews and exclusive videos of the capture of Kabul in 2021, delves into the stories of five of them. “What emerges is that they are all stories of girls like our daughters, like any Italian girl, but suddenly they were catapulted into the most absolute Middle Ages and found themselves faced with that black mythology of the Taliban that they had heard about from their parents. Their stories also undermine a stereotype about migrants and refugees: they wanted to stay at home, but due to violated human rights they were unable to do so”, underlines the journalist and filmmaker Zuccalà. The images of Afghanistan, a beautiful but little-known country from this point of view, contained in the documentary are unedited and first-hand, transmitted by an anonymous Afghan director for security reasons.
The title “Faghan” of the exhibition – curated by Giulia Tornari – means in the Dari language a moan, a cry of pain. The word is taken from a verse of “Daughter of Afghanistan” by the poet Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005), beaten to death by her husband who did not tolerate her independence as a woman and an established intellectual. “Freedom, for me, means having the right to choose. Freedom is having the right to education. Freedom is the pride of being a woman without the fear that, precisely because I am a woman, I cannot be free”, concludes Sonia, 30 years old, previously a driver of the first and only local transport service in Afghanistan managed only by women for women , the “Pink Shuttle”, now taking refuge in Verona with her seventeen-year-old sister.