What's left of the Syrian revolution?

Noura Ghazi Safadi in conversation with Francesca Caferri and Donatella Della Ratta.

It was 15 March 2011 and thousands of people took to the streets of Damascus, shouting slogans similar to those that had resounded in the streets of Tunis in the previous weeks. Who was there remembers those days as a moment of hope and the end of fear. Seven years later, everything has been shattered under the blows first of the civil war and then of the international conflict. And so many of the protagonists are now dead.

The session will feature Noura Ghazi Safadi, human rights lawyer and widow of Bassel Khartabil Safadi, an information engineer and activist and one of the fathers of the Syrian revolution, who was executed by the Syrian regime in 2015. And Donatella della Ratta, professor at John Cabot university, an expert on Syria and a friend of Bassel Khartabil.

to be followed by

The vanished image. Voice-video-sound improvisation on the archives of the peaceful revolution, Syria 2011.

The performance will provide a lyrical and poetic journey through the forgotten archives of the peaceful phase of the Syrian revolution. In particular, the personal archive of the pacifist activist Bassel Khartabil Safadi, who died in 2015 in a Syrian prison, offers the opportunity for a journey of speech, sound and music inside the repressed 2011, a year that saw peoples rebel against injustice and exploitation. The performance is a tribute to pacifist activists, and in particular to citizens who, armed with a video camera or smartphone, documented at great personal risk protests, sit-ins, and actions of civil disobedience in Syria throughout 2011; images which were removed or deleted from social media, ignored by mainstream media, and which marked a phase in history that risks being forgotten. To these "images in spite of everything", as the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman called them, the performance brings attention.

Lulu Shamiyya: text/spoken word

Marco G. Ferrari: live video

Ludovica Manzo, Igor Legari, Luca Venitucci: live music