A letter to hope and resistance

My dearest hope, my stubborn resistance,

I write to you from the warmth that persists in the dark. I went to see a love letter – one body writing to another across the chasm of years and spaces. Bita Bell’s The Sun Is Gone is a homage to Googoosh, the Iranian icon forced into a 21-year silence. But as I sat in the shifting dark, I realized the letter was not just from Bita to Googoosh. It was from a body to its own memory, from generations to their ghosts, from a future insistently whispering to its past. And so, it became a letter to you both.

An orange light falls on a figure curled between walls. The sound: a deep hum, a vibration from the belly of the earth, a guttural and cellular awakening. The body, a volcano in slow motion, erupts from the inside out. A breath becomes a hiss, a murmur becomes a limb unfurling from shadow into that soft orange glow. It is the awakening of a body that remembers what it means to be seen, to be heard, simply: to be.

Hope, you were there in that first exhale. You were the arm that dared the light, the spine that straightened against the weight of oppression. Bita dances between visibility and opacity, her form casting shadows that stretch like longings. She invokes a figure through the muscle memory of a collective yearning. The architectural structures around her move. They force us, the audience, to shift our gaze, to abandon our passive seats. We are no longer spectators; we become witnesses and participants.

Resistance, you arrived with a glamorous shimmer. The soundscape shifted into the echoes of the 60s and 70s, the era of Googoosh’s zenith. Bita, lip-syncing now, fully incarnates that spirit. Her movements open into splendid, rolling waves – poetic, humorous, tender. She offers fragments of translated lyrics like offerings of light, pieces of a mirror patiently reassembled to reflect not just an era, but a feeling, a loss. It is embodiment: the past putting on flesh, talking and dancing in the present tense.

As Bita herself said, “In becoming Googoosh, one voice becomes a chorus of silenced memories, nostalgic visions, and future whispers.” Here, that chorus swelled. Memories fluttered from her hands like butterflies, landing as tremors in our own bodies. We didn’t need to know the history to feel its weight and its flight. We remembered a memory that wasn’t even ours.

The political becomes irresistibly personal, felt in the flash of red and the thrum of the beat. The performance is an intrinsic critique of systematic, decades-long silencing. Yet, Bita’s response is not a shout, but a summoning. Through movement, light, and a meticulously crafted soundscape, it builds a bridge – not only to Googoosh, but to all of those who have known displacement or the quiet erasure of their stories. The icon becomes an auntie, a sister, a secret shared on the floor. Identity transcends; it becomes fluid, collective, resonant.

And this resonance was nurtured beyond the stage. The performance was the heart of a wider, sensual ecosystem Bita and her team created an abundant, multilayered encounter. Each element was an act of care, a refusal to let the story be contained. It was proof of the resilience required to bring such a work to life: a resilience born of a personal encounter with censorship, transformed into a generous, unstoppable creative force.

The Sun Is Gone is a portal, and we are ushered through. We are invited not just to watch, but to feel the space between loss and legacy, between a stolen past and a reclaimed future.

The sun may be gone, but the body remembers its warmth. The song may be banned, but the hum continues. This is the love letter. Sealed not with a kiss, but with a breath. Addressed to the past, delivered to the future. A love letter to you, Hope. A love letter to you, Resistance. To the diasporas that carry homelands in their gait, to the migrants whose bodies are living archives, to anyone who has ever had to hum a tune because singing was too dangerous – may we always have the courage to dance this letter into being.

With all my breath,

A Witness

Ale Zapata is a Mexican curator, cultural worker, and visual designer based in Vienna. Her work focuses on exploring gender discourse and identity, with a curatorial journey that has been largely self-taught and shaped by over a decade of immersive experience. Ale’s practice emphasizes care-driven methodologies and non-hierarchical structures, striving to foster inclusive and collaborative environments.