aiden Voyages examines concepts of personal identity and gender through illustrated journal translations of four women from different cultures and different countries of the Middle East; Egypt, Jordan, The Palestinian West Bank, and Iran, and one woman — myself — from the United States.

For one year starting in July and ending in June — on the same date every month — each of us kept a journal of our day; often recording the routines of life, our dreams and our intimate reflections.

The project covered three years; the first was dedicated to finding the women, the second to recording the journals, and the third to executing the web animations and original drawings. With one exception, the women chose to remain anonymous to me. While they chose the music, their physical appearance is fictional — created by me — based on their writings.

The collective result is a complex landscape of daily experience that escapes from the predictable reportage of Western media; a landscape that transcends geography and national boundaries and portrays both a powerful story of mutual identity and an even more poignant demonstration of individual differences.