In October 2021, I left Iran with 35 kilograms of luggage. Those 35 kilograms were my entire life my family, my language, my memories, my love, and the place where I existed for 36 years. Today, that weight feels unbearable. I feel crushed by it. I just want to breathe.
For nearly two years after migrating to Germany, I was unable to tell stories through my photographs. Photography, however, became the only way I learned how to breathe again.
Landless Trees is a photographic project about migration as a lived condition. It focuses on people who have been uprooted carrying their past while trying to exist in new environments. The project reflects on alienation, loneliness, and the quiet loss of identity and belonging that often remains unseen.
Migration is often reduced to practical challenges, but it also confronts us with who we are. Being an outsider becomes the cost of searching for freedom and a modern life. Around me, I saw many other immigrants, each with different stories, yet shaped by similar uncertainties.
In 2022, just one year after my migration, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began in Iran. Standing in a new country, I felt pulled back home. I did not know whether to return or keep moving forward. This tension, between leaving and longing, freedom and loss, runs through the project.
Migration carries pain, fatigue, silence, and deep wounds that are often invisible. No loneliness is small. These inner struggles can push people to the edge of collapse and regret.
Through photography, and through my understanding of design as a tool for social change, I seek not only to document these lives, but to create space for empathy—so migrants and refugees are not reduced to numbers, borders, or headlines.
