In 2025, we successfully completed our first creative writing course as Writing the Future; an experience both profound and luminous. Every moment of it called for its own narrative: a testimony to the courage, awareness, and perseverance of Afghan girls. We then sought to share this powerful experience of creativity, storytelling, and expression with a wider audience. The Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam chose to support our initiative. We launched a workshop that faciliated an art dialogue between the art students and the writers in Afghanistan.
The exhibition “Mirrors and Windows” was the result of this collaborative effort between the students of the Image&Language department of the Rietveld academy and the  students from Afghanistan - it was a work shaped by love, dedication, and solidarity. We shared the poetry and stories byte Afghan students with the Rietveld students, and forged connectuons between them. The exchange opened a window for seeing, and placed a mirror in front of human suffering. In doing so, we came to understand that pain, hope, joy, and dreams are forces of connection. The exhibition was not merely art. It was an attempt to see, to understand, and to connect worlds  that may be geographically and politically distant, yet are stitched together through art.
The students residing in Afghanistan worked under a pen name, for their safety. We thank Sahel, Nashenas, ‘A’, Habiba, Rowaida, Latifa, ‘S’, Fatema, and Husna for their brave and dedicated participation. We thank the students at Rietveld for their curiosity and talent: Na‘imah Bernard-Banton, Katinka Harmsen, Mialina Hörter, Santi Saiz Uruñuela, Eden Meulman, Roza Snels, Tom van Renen, Joris Pelder, Zwaan Schouten, Toyo Lee, Marie van Rijswijk, Mattéo Houdjal, Annija Jansone, Christie Staats, Liv Straat, Eef van der Laan, Ada James, Giulia Sachs. And Meynah Barekzai who joined in.
Everyone involved in this project has shown that each person, in their own capacity, can bring about change in the world. Here, color, voice, word, line, story, poetry, and song rise together in rebellion against silence and erasure; against discrimination; and against the normalization of injustice and violence in different corners of the world.