Gardens Speak – BUSART

Synikismos Festival 2019

Gardens Speak

the interactive performance by Lebanese Live Art pioneer Tania El Khoury, containing the oral histories of ten ordinary people from Syria who are buried in private gardens.

22–30.06.2019

3rd Primary School, 85 Dardanellion Street, Eleusis

Interactive performance – installation

Tania El Khoury

London / Beirut

Across Syria, many gardens conceal the dead bodies of activists and protesters who adorned the streets during the early periods of the uprising. These domestic 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 regime. The living protect the dead by conserving their identities, telling their stories, and not allowing their deaths to become instruments to the regime.

Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation containing the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in Syrian gardens. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories as they themselves may have recounted it. They are compiled with found audio that evidences their final moments.

Twenty-eight showings of Gardens Speak across five continents produced an archive of audience letters written as part of the performance. These handwritten letters, artifacts of each performance, provide insight into the varied audience experiences of Gardens Speak, including their reflections on politics, empathy, loss, and death. The letters were first conceptualized as a message of solidarity that would be written by audiences around the world and sent back to the families and friends of the deceased whose stories they shared. A few years later, the pile of letters kept growing. With it came the realization that the contents of the letters are overwhelmingly complex, messy, and intimate. They could not be reduced to a simple message of solidarity. Tell Me What I Can Do is a sentence written in a number of audience letters, asking the martyrs of Gardens Speak for guidance.

In this installation, the artist asks the audience for guidance on what to do with the accumulated material — evidence of our encounter and our shared responsibility. The installation also features responses to the letters from some of the early collaborators in the making of Gardens Speak.

Not all audience letters made it into the installation. Some were lost along the way, confiscated by police. Others will be buried in the ground, never to be read.