Opera Decolonized: Listening to Afghan Women's Voices (Art of Research, Aalto 2026)

From Silencing to Listening: Opera-Installation as Cross-Cultural Medium for Afghan Women’s Voices

Paper presented at the Art of Research conference at Aalto University (2026)

Summary

Unknown, I Live With You (2018) was built around a problem: how do you bring clandestine writings by Afghan women into a Western artistic space without reproducing the very structures that silenced them? This paper, written as a member of The Airport Society collective, traces the formal decisions behind the opera-installation — venue, costume, casting, composition, audience placement, temporal structure — and argues that each one was an ethical choice as much as an artistic one.

At the heart of the argument is opera’s fundamental strength: a form where music, staging, dramaturgy, costume, and space are genuinely co-equal, demanding total presence from its audience. The paper asks whether that quality can be turned against opera’s own colonial tendencies — and whether a non-hierarchical working process, from democratic decision-making to shared yoga sessions before rehearsals, can mirror and reinforce what happens on the stage.

The paper will be presented at the Art of Research 2026 conference at Aalto University. It is currently available as a preprint on SocArXiv.

Links

Preprint: From Silencing to Listening — SocArXiv

Conference: https://events.aalto.fi/en/3X3IKxA7/g/82Z1zDshz8/art-of-research-2026-4a3bQtTRKz/overview

Citation

Głowicka, Kasia. 2026. “From Silencing to Listening: Opera-Installation as Cross-Cultural Medium for Afghan Women’s Voices.” Preprint. SocArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/m2hnq_v1.