Gardens Speak

Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury makes her debut at the Holland Festival with her interactive sound installation Gardens Speak, a tribute to the victims of the early days of the uprising in Syria. The installation is based on the stories of ten ordinary Syrians who were killed by Bashar al-Assad's regime and were buried in domestic or public gardens across Syria.

Ten audience members are invited to enter the installation at a time. The space is dark and quiet containing four tones of soil and ten gravestones. The audience’s shoes and socks must be taken off. Each visitor receives a torch and a plastic coat. Under each gravestone, a small speaker is buried, each whispering one of the stories of the ten Syrians. The audience are invited to dig into the soil to get closer to the sound. Each of the ten stories comprises oral history fragments, which have been carefully constructed with the help of friends and family members of the killed. They are written in the first person to retell their stories as they themselves would have recounted it. These intimate and personal stories are interwoven with real audio fragments, excerpts from video diaries and YouTube videos, at some point evidencing the moment the victim was killed or buried. 

All over Syria, people have been buried in gardens, rather than official cemeteries. This often happens out of necessity – not only because the official cemeteries are sometimes shelled when burials are taking place, but also because prior to the burial the regime has sometimes forced families to sign documents exonerating the regime of their loved one's death. These domestic and rushed burials play out a continuing collaboration between the living and the dead. The dead protect the living by not exposing them to further danger at the hands of the state and the living protect the dead by cherishing and nurturing their identities and their stories, preventing the regime from erasing their memories. 

Ordinary people’s narratives are often lost in the magnitude of historical events, and the broad geopolitical narratives are all what get reported in the media. The Syrian conflict has already created more than four million refugees and an estimated 250,000 dead. Gardens Speak brings the horror back to a human scale. Lying in the earth, audience are confronted with their own mortality, lending the installation a universally recognisable dimension. 

Tania El Khoury considers herself a 'live artist', focusing on interactive and provocative performances, which actively involve audiences. At the centre of her work is the intimate relationship between the artist and the audience – in one of her performances, Maybe if you choreograph me you will feel better (2011), the audience was restricted to one single visitor at a time and was only performed for male audiences. Gardens Speak premiered in May 2014 at the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, Australia after a preview in Artsadmin, London in March 2014.