Excavating the Sky

Before a nine meter long banner at the Venice Architecture Biennale, architects, filmmakers, and activists from Syria and the Arab World gathered within the Arsenale for a series of events focused on Syria and the production of its landscape from before the First World War till today. The main focus was a “displaced pavilion” in Syria, built in lieu of a structure or permanent exhibition at the biennale: a well, recently dug in an undisclosed location in Syria in collaboration with a local resistance movement and currently providing water for a community of 15,000 people.

A well is a political necessity in order for place-ness to be produced in a Syrian landscape ravaged by years of neglect and war. It is not a question of writing a building upon the land, but an attempt to forge a new way of building in accordance with the current context.

A single drawing of this well was present in Venice, around which film screenings and discussions took place. As well as raising hopes from the ground with the well, “Excavating the Sky” explores four moments focused on flight as its starting point: the first aeroplanes to land in Syria in 1914, the French mandate shelling of Damascus in 1925, the Syrian Cosmonaut Muhammad Faris in 1987, and the story of a barrel bomb dropped from a helicopter into a latrine in 2014

Date of work: 2014.

Location: Syria

Publication: Excavating the Sky, 2014.

Exhibition: Venice Biennale 2014: Fundamentals.