The Problem We Are Trying to Address
We live in a time when stories are disappearing.
Not because they are unimportant, but because the systems that once carried them no longer make space for them.
War, authoritarianism, displacement, bureaucracy, borders, and fear all work quietly. They erase people not only from places, but from memory. Some lives are never recorded. Some voices are never archived. Some experiences never reach the public record.
When this happens, violence does not need spectacle. Silence does the work.
In Afghanistan, cultural life is being systematically dismantled. Art forms are banned. Music, theatre, dance, and visual representations of living beings are prohibited. Women and girls are silenced and excluded from public life. Punishment is public, but explanation is absent. What remains is fear, absence, and forgetting.
But this problem does not belong to one country.
Across the world, people fall between categories. They are not refugees yet. Not citizens anymore. Not documented. Not legible to funding forms, archives, or headlines. Their stories exist in the interstitial spaces between systems, places, and languages.
When stories disappear, injustice becomes easier.
Without stories, there is no memory.
Without memory, there is no accountability.
Without accountability, violence repeats itself quietly.
Stories From Nowhere 