video, 2025, color, sound, 20 min 30 s.
With production assistance and sound design by Jean-Philippe Thibault
In this 20-minute video, a juxtaposition of present and past sheds light on women’s timeless struggles for freedom. The work features an antique frieze depicting the battle between the Greeks and the Amazons – female warriors that some historians interpret as representations of the Persians opposing the Greeks, and who at the time were designated as the Others: the enemies, the barbarians, the weak.
An association is made between these antique figures and contemporary Iranian women, whose fight for freedom is expressed, among other ways, through the movement of their bodies in public spaces—by dancing and engaging in athletic actions. Their weapons are their mobile phones, which capture and share these actions on social media, creating new representations and new meanings of daily courage and strength.
At times, we glimpse the silhouettes of women and screens opening here and there among the sculpted forms of the warrior bodies in bas-relief. The soundtrack is a composition that combines the original sounds of clips published on social media with audio fragments from analysts and historians who are Amazon specialists, featured in France Culture podcasts . Zelli’s work thus questions the complexity of imagined identities, between myth and reality.
Video subtitles translated from French (rotate your phone for a better view):
