The Al-Omari Mosque, in Deraa. Downtown Daraya, a suburb of Damascus. Place de l’Horloge, in Homs. The campus of the University of Aleppo. On the map of the Syrian revolution, these four places shine with unparalleled brilliance. It is there that the anti-Assad uprising took shape, in March and April of the year 2011. It is there that the emblematic songs and slogans of the movement were invented. And this is also where the regime’s repression made its first victims. In a few weeks, these four places, without much fame until then, became the beating heart of the revolution, the incarnation of the mad hope of a people.
Today, these founding places, over which pro-government forces have gradually regained control, have disappeared into a black hole. They are out of the reach of almost all journalists, with the Syrian regime only handing out visas to a handful of hand-picked favorites. Some sites have been destroyed, such as the Al-Omari mosque, whose minaret was razed to the ground by shellfire in 2013, or like Daraya, transformed into a ghost city, into a concrete skeleton, by barrel bombs dropped by helicopters Syrians.
Above all, these sites have been covered, like all of Syria, with a blanket of silence. The one imposed by the power, which killed and imprisoned a large part of the men and women who, by their courage, had given these places a sudden notoriety. And that more and more observed by the media, local and foreign, worn out and bored by ten years of one-sided war. Never has Syria seemed so extinct, inanimate, as if it had been put under a bell, sent back into limbo.
Creative energy
This is what makes the Creative Memory website “Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution” so expensive. Directed by the graphic designer Sana Yazigi, it aims to list all the forms of artistic expression that the anti-Assad uprising has sparked. Responsible before 2011 for a publication that listed cultural events in Syria, this Damascene had been struck, from the first days of the sling, by the creative energy that it had released. From Beirut, where she took refuge with her family the following year, Sana Yazigi immersed herself in the flood of Facebook pages devoted to the revolution to extract photos, videos, drawings, caricatures, paintings, poems or graffiti. the most striking.
Online since 2013, the site has gradually grown thanks to the support of foreign patrons and the recruitment of a small team, to the point of today containing 13,000 digital parts. It is a hybrid place, unique in its kind, a mixture of archive room, activist forum and exhibition hall. Organized into several sub-projects, including a map and a timeline, it forms a living museum of the popular uprising of 2011-2012 and the civil war that followed.
You have 57.7% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
