“We’ve been caught between two places, swinging in the middle, trying to build something like a home. During this time, I watch my mother with her scissors, cutting her friends’ hair as they always ask her to, she is not a hairdresser and never have been, but here in exile they only trust each other’s hands.
I listen to their conversations, about love and hate, joy and pain, many stories of the war and what they went through. Together they created this small family, a home with no ground. Here I stay in between and I feel that I could belong again.
Immersed in a sense of displacement within time and space of various lives, the project started as an attempt for me to understand the situation I found my self in “Exile”. I started documenting the lives of my mother and her two friends, all originating from different cities and backgrounds in Syria, I observe how these women managed to support each other and create a new connection.
Through telling personal stories of exiled women, the project addresses the reflection of having to leave one’s home with no possibility of going back. It raises topics related to losing identity, difficulties of belonging, the true meaning of home and separation and the process of trying to rebuild from nothing. All of this is explored while going through traumatic war experiences and dealing with PTSD. I wanted to show what it looks like from inside our walls, giving a subjective perspective to a subject that is often approached from an “outside” point of view, represented as numbers rather than as individuals and humans.
During the course of this project, I realised that not only my mother and her friends, but women from various communities in exile, also abstained from hairdressers. When I asked them why, their response was often a simple “I don’t know why.” Yet, as they continued speaking, they unveiled the challenges of exile: the struggle for confidence, constant change, enduring waiting periods, language barriers, the process of adaptation, and the recurrent experience of loss, so in the light of this they search for each other they all became hairdressers.”
