“Dear mother, I made us a seat”: a Mother’s Day tribute to the women of Iran

Iran is teaching us anew: the world is shaped by mothers and daughters.

In September 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa (Zhina) Amini died in a Tehran hospital following her arrest by Iran’s religious “morality” police. Amini was accused of failing to wear her headscarf in accordance with Iran’s compulsory veiling laws. Government officials claimed she suffered a heart attack, but eyewitnesses, including women detained with her, reported that she had been brutally beaten.

Amini’s death ignited the “Woman, Life, Freedom” political movement in Iran, led almost entirely by young Iranian women. It quickly became one of the most potent challenges to Iran’s religious leadership in years.

For women in the Iranian diaspora, it was a complex and emotional time.

“It sparked something in us that we couldn’t ignore,” Nila Rezaei, an Iranian-Australian designer living in Sydney, Australia, tells Design Observer. “We were consumed by a mix of emotions—pride, anger, helplessness—and a deep, lingering guilt for not being there on the streets. We felt disconnected, far from the women risking everything, and knew we had to find a way to turn that guilt into action.”

Rezaei’s answer, as you’ll see below, became Crafted Liberation, a now internationally recognized collaborative activism project. It has taken over 516 donated headscarves, many of them given anonymously, and turned them into stadium seats: each scarf a story, each seat a call for action and inclusion.

The project is still collecting scarves and can be seen in its current iteration in person as part of a three-city European tour: the Munich Creative Business Week Design Summit on May 12; Berlin Design Week – Exhibition at KALLE Halle from May 15–18; and the IKEA Museum, Sweden, “Women in Design: Changemakers,” opening on June 4.

Rezaei understands that design is both a tool for social change and a tribute to the earlier generations of women who have fought—and often died—for liberation in Iran.

She was just fourteen years old when she was stopped by the morality police, the earlier generation of the very guards who would later allegedly murder Amini. She says it was her mother, Tara Nouri, who saved her.

“While I was resisting, my mother arrived like a storm. I’ll never forget her voice—fierce, shaking, protective.”

Nouri’s story is embodied in every collected scarf.

“My mother carried the pain of being separated from her own mother—a sacrifice she made when she became a political activist in her teens,” Rezaei says. It is that transmuted pain that she hopes will inspire all women to fight for each other and the world. “I owe everything to my mother: her fierceness, her will to stand up for the truth. She taught me how to be a proud woman and a human being. She taught me kindness, how to lead, and how to empower others.”

Her powerful letter to her mother is below. But find a comfortable seat and watch the video first. It will be well worth your time.

— Ellen McGirt, Editor-in-chief

Dear Mother, I Made Us a Seat

You taught me to fight, not with fists, but with truth. You taught me to lead with my chest open, and my feet planted firmly in the soil of what I believe. Before I ever knew what resistance was, I saw it in the way you moved through the world.

I saw it when you stood in front of the morality police, pulling me from their hands like an angry lioness. I was only 14, my scarf slightly out of place, my voice not yet grown. But you had already prepared me: “If they stop you, don’t get in their car. Call me.”

And I did. And you came.

I will never forget the sound of your voice that day, how it cracked open the silence like a storm. I think that moment taught me something I couldn’t yet name: that resistance can live in the body. In the throat. In the hand that reaches forward.

You gave me all of it.

And yet, I left.

At 19, I boarded a plane and flew away from Tehran, chasing freedom, chasing air. I didn’t fully understand what I was leaving behind. You carried the pride of a mother watching her daughter rise, and the ache of knowing exactly what that flight meant. It meant building a life I could thrive in, while grieving the one I couldn’t have. It meant carrying two selves: one that’s free, and one that’s always looking back. The same ache your own mother must have felt, when you left home to become a political activist, still just a teenager.

Now, years later, I sit in a studio in Sydney, transforming discarded headscarves into stadium seats — my hands busy with tools, my heart full of stories. Crafted Liberation didn’t begin as a design project. It began as a reckoning. A return. A way to hold my guilt, my privilege, and turn it into something that might matter.

When Mahsa Amini died in 2022 — 10 years since I’d flown from home — I was gutted. The grief sat heavy. And then, the grief turned into something else: fire. I remembered you. I remembered the girls I grew up with. I remembered the hands of the morality police. And I knew I couldn’t stay quiet.

You and Dad were the first people I called. I told you my idea: to collect the headscarves of Iranian women and transform them into something else. Something that could speak back. You said, “Are you sure you’re ready for this? You might not be able to return to Iran for a while.”

I said, “Yes,” I said. “I’m ready.”

And so you began collecting scarves in Iran. Going from house to house. Gathering what had once been symbols of oppression, now transformed by intention into offerings. You sent me the first package yourself. Ten kilos of scarves. When I opened the box, I wept.

They were not black. They were not heavy.

They were vibrant. Alive with color and memory. Radiating the creativity of a country that the world has never been allowed to fully see.

As we experimented with materials — lamination, compression — I felt the weight of each story press into form. The seats began to hold more than function. They began to hold silence, defiance, and love. Stadium seats are a symbol of exclusion, but we began to reclaim the space that Iranian women have been banned from entering since 1981, to turn an object of restriction into a structure of resistance.

And you, always you, in every thread.

The women who donated their scarves often remained anonymous, many still live in Iran, where safety often requires silence. But that anonymity was never absent. It was power. It was a presence in another form — a shared, invisible web of solidarity. These women, like you, know what it means to speak without saying a word.

This work has changed me. It has redefined design for me. No longer is it about form or function, but about holding space. Design is a vessel for memory. For grief. For collective dreams.

It’s why I left my full-time job. It’s why, in 2024, I co-founded one of the first female-led industrial design studios in Australia. It’s why I stand on stages at places like Berlin Design Week and the IKEA Museum, not to showcase a product, but to share a story.

Our story.

If you were sitting in the front row of one of these talks, I don’t think I could hold it together. I would cry. Like I did the day you walked into our filming session, unannounced. I burst into tears before you even said a word. You are still here. Still my fiercest supporter. If it weren’t for you, we would never have collected this many scarves. 

You didn’t just raise me — you helped raise this movement.

Mama, I’m sorry I left. I carry that pain every day. But I am who I am because of you. Because of your fire. Because of the path you carved. I am just continuing what you started — what your mother started before you. She, too, carried quiet resistance, letting you go, believing in your fight, holding hope in silence. 

This fire didn’t start with us. It lived in every woman who raised her voice or simply stayed standing. Loud or quiet, every Iranian woman I know carries her own version of it.

These seats we are building? I hope you see your hopes in them. I hope one day, we sit side by side in a stadium in Iran. And I hope every woman who has ever felt invisible will know: you were never just fabric. You were always a story.

With everything I have,

Nila

به زنان ایرانم
اگر امروز صدایی هست، از انعکاس صدای شماست.
این صندلی‌ها فقط صندلی نیستند. هر کدام، ادای احترامی‌ست به شجاعت شما 

Translation:
To the women of Iran 
If there is a voice today, it’s an echo of yours.
These seats are not just seats. Each one is a tribute to your courage