Vice and Virtue, or Fire and Stone

This is a soundscape composition based on the principles of musique concrète, crafted from over a thousand archival materials—news clips, documentaries, films, personal records, and travelogues—documenting Afghan women’s lives from the Taliban’s rise in 1994 to the end of 2024. Nearly six hundred selected sound events are structured narratively using linguist Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis framework—text, discourse practice, and social practice: raw audio as a vessel for social power and lived experience, curated media clips as intertextual fields of ideology, and deliberate silences as gaps where historical truths are erased.

On August 21, 2024, Afghanistan enacted a new morality law restricting women’s public speech. While some reports were later debunked as sensationalized, the incident still forced us to confront media paradoxes: to what extent are narratives about Afghan women reflections of reality, or another manifestation of power discipline? Just like Sharbat Gula, the Afghan girl immortalized by National Geographic’s 1985 cover, only to vanish from public consciousness so quickly after the media frenzy subsided, historical truths also repeatedly collapse between the selective focus and collective amnesia.

We believe every sound in this work carries duality: they not only serve as evidence of the presence of witnesses but also permeate the preconceptions and the distortions of intention in the transmission chain (including ourselves as creators). These accelerated playback of suffering, the looping of stereotypes, and the digitally distorted testimonies will pose questions about the politics of visibility: in this public discourse space where algorithms dominate attention and traffic defines transmission value, how can we extricate ourselves from Baudrillard's conspiracy and allow facts to be correctly accepted, rejected, or forgotten?

In summary, this is a sonic sculpture documenting 30 years of Afghan women’s social existence, forged from acoustic imprints of their survival. To this day, Afghan women remain shackled by restrictions, while struggles for education rights, equal opportunities, freedom of dress, and marital autonomy echo historical battles once fought elsewhere. The "natural rights" we enjoy today were won by voices that resonated through the silent nights. May these clipped, reassembled, and recontextualized sound waves derive meaning from lives still resonating.

آنها/They are always resonating.

[All related income will be donated to UN Women.]