Afghanistan : In the shadow of the white flags
Sandra Calligaro
Recipient of a 2024 Françoise Demulder Grant
On August 15, 2021, following the withdrawal of the United States, the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, twenty years after they had been driven out. As soon as they returned, a veil of darkness fell over the country. The media were silenced, girls were excluded from secondary education and music was banned. Women were once again ordered to cover themselves from head to toe: in cities, the veils of long black abayas float alongside electric blue burqas. Excluded from most workplaces and social venues, women have been erased from the public domain and confined to their homes. This exclusion is all the more painful for women in the cities who were encouraged by the West to become emancipated and see the world differently.
As a theocracy was gradually established, I tried to document women’s tragic daily lives: their confinement, but also their resilience. I wanted to paint the portrait of a subjugated society which is trying to adapt and resist against increasingly repressive laws.
Preview
Despite the restrictions, women find ways to continue to live. Though their presence in public spaces is limited, they are still authorized to work in certain sectors, such as healthcare, art, and crafts: grey areas that they take advantage of to continue to exist. They secretly get ready in beauty salons, behind closed curtains, and they attend classes in living rooms and basements. Some even manage to be around young men during drawing workshops. These may seem like insignificant acts to us, but in the Afghan context they take genuine courage. The women who do these things not only defy Taliban law: they also stand up to a profoundly patriarchal and conservative society, where oppression is not limited to religion.
The Afghanistan that I show here is a mixture of hope and melancholy. My photographic approach was to look at individual lives, with a particular focus on interiors, the last places where women can be free. As a woman, I can go through the symbolic and physical curtain that separates the sexes (the parda), and enter the closed spaces where women’s lives continue. In contrast, in the photographs taken outside, in places that are reserved for men, we can search, but we will struggle to find a woman: they have become a detail in a photograph.
Between the lines, I also evoke those who, during the twenty-year international intervention, grew up far away from cities, in rural areas that aid did not reach. Most of the young Taliban combatants are from places like this, untouched by progress. As there was no school, they went to the madrasa (Islamic school) and as soon as they reached adolescence, they were recruited for jihad. To what extent did they choose their destiny?
Crushed by over forty years of deadly conflict, two worlds, and two Afghanistans collide: for some, their dreams have been shattered and their hopes have been dashed; for others, they are back at the front of the stage. It is this complexity, which is inherent to war and which fractures societies, that my work tries to embrace.
Sandra Calligaro
With support for documentary photography from the Centre national des arts plastiques, and support from Brouillon d’un rêve by LaScam and from La Culture avec la Copie Privée
