Across Syria, many gardens conceal the dead bodies of activists and protestors 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 of the regime. Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation that toured around the world. It contains 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 would have recounted it. This book contains the narrative text of those ten oral histories in both English and spoken Arabic. It includes an […]

Based on The Search for Power lecture-performance, this book contains the performance script, designed archival documents, and reflections by the collaborating artist and historian. On a night with a sudden electricity blackout in Beirut, the artist and her historian husband discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. Born during the Lebanese Civil War, the artist grew up thinking that the problem of electricity in Lebanon began during the war. The historian, however, recalled finding a government document dated 1952 that announced scheduled power outages across Beirut. The two decided to go on a journey to document the history of blackouts in Lebanon. Most were not accessible. The paper trail led them through archives in five different countries. They reached as far back as 1906 when electricity was first introduced to Beirut. They found a transnational story involving businessmen, politicians, warlords, multinational corporations, and colonial powers. They discovered traces of […]