
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 myself 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 beautifully and powerfully managed to support each other and create a new connection through haircuts.
Listening to their conversations of the war, and what they went through. Each woman had her own story, different from the others, each one lived her own version of the war, but when they talked about living in exile, the story is always the same. 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 and they all became hairdressers.











