Freedom From Nature

A woman from Iran, a political refugee since 2020, finds her freedom in the green landscapes of the north she misses and in the simple act of standing with her arms open to the sky. Through collage, Leila gathers mountains, vineyards, and open water around a figure reaching upward, and tells a story of moving from a watched life toward a free one, a freedom that, she insists, nobody can limit.

STORIES FROM CYPRUS

6/15/20262 min read

At the centre of her collage, a woman stands with her arms thrown open, facing the sea. The gesture is the whole story. It is what freedom looks like in a single body: unguarded, expansive, reaching toward the open air with nothing held back. Around her, Leila has built a world of green. The forested mountains and red-roofed towns of northern Iran. Rolling vineyards under snow-capped peaks. Hills cultivated by hand, alive and productive. This is the landscape she misses, and it is also, for her, the very image of liberty.

Leila left Iran in 2020 as a political refugee. She does not soften this. Her relationship to her homeland is layered with both love and rupture, with longing for its beauty and refusal of what drove her out. She wears the freedom she fights for openly, even in the way she presents herself, and her collage is a declaration as much as a memory.

When she speaks of freedom, she locates it in nature, and specifically in people who work the land and bring something forth from it. The vineyards in her work are not incidental. They represent cultivation, patience, the dignity of producing something real from the earth. For Leila, this connection to nature is bound up with the freedom she seeks: the freedom to tend, to grow, to be part of a living landscape rather than confined within walls. Faith runs through her story too, a religious anchoring that gives her strength. And the green of the north, more than anything, is what her heart returns to, the part of Iran she carries and cannot stop missing.

The rainbow of colour she placed along the bottom of the collage speaks the same language as the woman with open arms. It is variety, possibility, the full spectrum of a life lived in the open rather than under restriction.

What she wants understood is the trajectory of her whole journey, and she states it as a transformation. From a life of being observed, watched, constrained, to a life of real freedom. From a woman who lived under limitation to a woman who wants freedom and intends to seize it fully. Her final words are not a wish but a refusal. Nobody can limit that. She has travelled too far and surrendered too much to allow anyone to draw the borders of her freedom again. Her collage holds the green she lost, the freedom she found, and the open-armed figure who stands, at last, facing the sea on her own terms.

HERS

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