Azade Shahmiri

How does the present age, illuminated from the year 2070, overlap with “today”?

“How will future generations understand our era?”

This question is one that should be considered within the fields of politics, technology, the arts, and beyond. It is also at the root of the perspective toward contemporary society found throughout Voicelessness.

The year is 2070. The setting is a dystopian world where freedom of expression is suppressed. The story centers on a young woman’s struggle to discover the truth about her grandfather who disappeared more than 50 years ago. In a world where speech is controlled and inconvenient facts about past events cannot be publicly stated, what truth can the protagonist find?

Voicelessness is written, directed, and performed by Azade Shahmiri, a former journalist, playwright, and performer based in Iran’s largest city, Tehran. Born out of her own experiences, the piece depicts how an unjust situation in the past drives a woman to recreate her own narrative through documents, collections of footage and sound recordings. When there is no evidence of an event does that mean it never happened? If the available evidence confirms the occurrence of an event, does that mean that the event occurred? This performance can be seen as a story about how we live today.