Audio, the new video (II): Syrian dead speak at Gardens Speak (HF16)

'This regime also rules over you after you die. The regime steals your story. They use you to tell their own story. Relatives are forced to sign statements that the dead were killed by the opposition. The regime uses the dead to oppress the living.' Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury made a statement: Gardens Speak (Gardens Speak). An installation, an immersive[hints]definition: immersive, making you forget the real world around you[/hints] performance, in which the spectators themselves are actors. A performance that consists of a mountain of earth from which soft voices sound from beneath tombstones. That performance comes in June to Amsterdam, as one of the examples of the new Holland Festival programming by festival director Ruth MacKenzie.

The pile of earth in and on which the installation takes place represents the many thousands of anonymous backyard graves in Syria. At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the struggle was still mainly between opponents of President Assad's dictatorship and his (secret) police. The first victims were often still just students taking part in peaceful demonstrations, handing out pamphlets, or attending the funeral of a friend. After all: bombing funerals was and is a proven method of murderous regimes and crime syndicates to eliminate insurgent networks.

Tania El Khoury heard of the Syrian alternative in 2013: the private burial in one's own backyard, or failing that, in an anonymous city park, with no headstone or memorial. Such an action is both an expression of fear and an act of resistance: these are deaths that the government can no longer abuse. 'The play was not originally intended for European audiences either. It was made in Lebanon and the text was also in Arabic. The last thing I thought about was the European audience. The idea was to give the nameless dead a grave, with beautifully calligraphed letters on it. In real life, many of these people were buried without headstones, anonymously. I then wanted to do it in other languages, with different headstones, and local earth each time. Every country has different earth, after all.'

Where did the idea come from to literally dig for the story, in an almost real cemetery?

''The starting point is the sound. You have to become alert to what you hear. The idea was: wherever you are in the world, you will hear the dead speaking if you hold your ears to the ground. Once we started working on the design, I discovered that it would be more effective if people really had to actively engage with it, by digging for themselves. And then when you look at it from above, it also looks like the spectators in their white suits are themselves the dead, lying there. As soon as they then take off their protective clothes again and start writing those notes, they turn back into the visiting relatives.''

Afterwards, as a spectator, you get to write a letter to the dead person you just listened to. What happens to those notes?

''Originally, the idea was to share some of those stories with the people who had told them to us: relatives, friends. But I find that difficult. Not only because they are often very personal messages, people really put their souls into them. So it is also too difficult to share them with the bereaved: they are too personal. I did use some of those notes in a book I made about this project. I also like those letters as objects. You can see that they have been under the earth. Maybe I will exhibit them again, so people can see them.'

'In those notes, people also talk more about themselves than about the dead person. For example, they write: 'I don't know if I would have been so brave in your shoes'. Or 'You're the same age as me'. I like that very much. But it also speaks of a sense of powerlessness: the pain is too great.'

In the Netherlands, first in Rotterdam (Rabih Mroué), and later in the Holland Festival (Walid Raad), Lebanese artists have visited a few times, with performances that were more documentary than theatrical in character. Sometimes they were nothing more than powerpoint presentations, but very special ones. Do you also place yourself in this tradition of Lebanese documentary theatre?

'The postwar[hints]The Lebanese Civil War (Arabic: الحرب الأهلية اللبنانية , Al-Ḥarb al-Ahliyyah al-Libnāniyyah) was a civil war at Lebanon from 13 April 1975 to 13 October1990 which resulted in the deaths of about 250000 people. As a result of this civil war, nearly one million people fled Lebanon.(source: wikipedia)[/hints] art scene in Beirut is very busy telling the hushed-up stories. The Lebanese war is not well documented. So what I have in common with that generation of artists is that we want to record history. But people like Walid Raad use fiction and even lies to tell history, while I engage in pure 'oral history'. Everything I do is the truth. And I want to make it literally tangible. So that goes beyond visual art.'

Sound is essential in performance. Indeed, the performance is sound. Thanks to that sound, you cannot help but go along with the story. That is stronger than video.

'I see this kind of interactive, immersive art as a political tool By having to dive into it like this, you are forced to take a stand. You can't remain passive. I also clearly take sides. This work is about the very first days of the uprising, which was then really an uprising of people resisting 40 years of oppression. Now we forget that because we see a huge civil war. But we should not forget that it started with that genuine uprising.'