As I write these lines, where I was born and live, there is a broad protest of women in the streets demanding their basic rights, which has united people around the world against oppression and injustice. I wonder now what our play has to say to the audiences-protesters of this time, now that the youth have fearlessly turned the streets into a scene.

Voicelessness is a personal piece for me, though it is neither autobiographical nor a documentary performance. Perhaps it is more my grief over the death of my father and dealing with the trauma of his loss. But when I distance myself from that, I see that my personal science fiction narrative is a continuation of the historical claim for the right to truth and the right to know.

While depicting a young woman’s desperate attempt to close the unfinished narratives of the past with a technological tool, Voicelessness is an exploration of the notion of the “real” and its relations to the documents which are only accessible through manipulated testimonies, distorted accounts, and constructed witnesses of the past.

For me, the issue of Voicelessness is the theme of our time; the constant struggle with the state of being voiceless, the search for a way, however improbable, not only to discover the unresolved truth, but also to recognize it in a probable future; to make heard the unheard voices that float in the air; “the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Azade Shahmiri
October 5, 2022
Tehran