Another Cut
قصة شعر أخرى
Another Cut
Hair carries profound cultural and personal significance, particularly in Arab traditions, where cutting it marks moments of grief, loss, and transformation. Long considered a marker of identity, beauty, and femininity, its removal embodies rupture and redefinition, signaling both mourning and renewal. In Another Cut, haircutting becomes more than a routine act: it transforms into a gesture of intimacy, a way to create connection and community within isolation.
Exile is not only a distance measured by borders; it is a quiet severing, a disruption of memory, continuity, and belonging. The body becomes both the site and the witness of this rupture, carrying histories, traumas, and adaptations. Yet within displacement, unexpected forms of connection emerge, as intimacy and care are reconfigured into shared resilience.
Another Cut is a photography project that follows a hairdresser living in exile and working from her small apartment in the suburbs of Paris. The home-salon becomes a focal point for encounters where haircuts, shared stories, and daily routines transform a constrained space into one of presence and continuity. Clients arrive with their own histories, inscribed in gestures, postures, and in their hair.
The repetitive acts of cutting echo the repetitive negotiations of life in exile. Here, repetition becomes rhythm, a shared tempo shaped by conversation, silence, advice, and laughter. Haircutting functions as exchange.
By documenting these encounters, the project places the exiled body at the intersection of the personal and the social. Ordinary gestures of shared care take on deeper meaning, turning intimate spaces into sites of memory, resistance, and reconnection. Another Cut reflects on being cut off from home while observing how women create spaces of intimacy and solidarity in exile..
