Once upon a time—during the so-called end of the Roman Empire—a new theocracy rose from its ashes. Between the 4th and 5th centuries, in what we now call the Byzantine Era, power consolidated once again under the banner of Christian rule. Some say it was the Roman Empire under a new guise. Either way, it marked yet another chapter of control justified by religious belief.
 
This artwork emerges from that legacy. A Christian woman—painted into the ancient Byzantine ruins of a historic Jerusalem church—melts into the stone that once upheld the weight of patriarchal doctrine. She is tired. Tired of defending her body. Tired of covering up. Her skin flows with the bricks that once contained her. She becomes the architecture itself—no longer separate, no longer confined.
 
The photograph captures remains of a Byzantine mosaic discovered at the site of Saint Peter in Gallicantu Church in Jerusalem. The woman, of Armenian Lebanese Christian descent, merges with the ruins through the art of mimetic body painting. She leans on the magnified stonework, dissolving into it—at once vanishing and reclaiming space.
 
Her invisibility speaks for the hidden voices of women throughout history. Silenced, sidelined, instrumentalized—women have long been treated as footnotes to men’s stories, used to prop up patriarchal narratives. And yet, it is she who brewed, birthed, wove, taught, healed. The foundations of civilization were laid by her hands. Her authority was never granted; it was stolen.
 
As her bare form reveals itself across these relics of empire, Herstory is exposed—buried beneath layers of doctrine, now remembered. She is not an accessory to history. She is its origin.
Woman. Life. Freedom.