Risk of Extinction

In the cold season, close to one another in warm night shelters, they wrap themselves in their leopard print blankets like a protective shell, as though they try to tie a sort of need to an instinctive force—or, at the same time, to point to the violence and fear nearby.
The central part of this project involves the collaborative use of eight automatic film cameras by a group of women impacted by social harm.
In the main part of this participatory project, I entrusted eight automatic film cameras to women who had been harmed by societal conditions, so they could freely document their lives freely—without constraints, without filters—capturing whatever drew their attention from their own perspective—so that perhaps other dimensions of their lives might be revealed. Some of these women did not have identification documents or were not Iranian nationals, and over the years, they had been imprisoned multiple times due to criminal activities. Although there was no guarantee that the cameras or photo negatives would be returned, not only were the cameras brought back in perfect condition, but it was also notable how precise, punctual, and ethically committed the women were in their work. It was as if, until then, no one had ever trusted them enough to let them prove they were responsible and had a voice worth hearing.
The collective outcome of the women’s work in this project is a documentary image—one that prompts us to reflect on how human dignity and social status can change, for, much like the process of this collaboration itself, many of our behaviors are shaped by the social conditions in which we are embedded.
In another part of this project, I depicted portraits of these women in the margins of the capital—portraits that reflect their current condition, shaped by circumstances that are unnatural, yet filled with longing. These women, with green oval-shaped backgrounds, appear this time within the womb of a city—one in which they no longer have the strength or capacity to give birth. And if a child has been born somewhere, it has been given away—out of one need, into the hands of another. To the point where the very possibility of extinction begins to echo endlessly, becoming a question in itself.