Today, we opened our archives too.

In full honesty to you, our dear reader, this opening has its origin in a time when this over-consumed cloth was impossible to rip – the only reality we knew and inhabited. In this spirit of acceptance and defeat, however, we believed there was still something meaningful to say about a past, a revolutionary time, that felt closed and sealed forever as a political project.

You can retrace this origin of this collection in the acts of documenting and archiving that, since the revolution, had been powerful tools for recording the realities of war. They also became a form of resistance against oppression and the foundation for demands of justice and accountability in Syria and its diaspora. The preservation of stolen, smuggled, salvaged materials – be it videos, memoirs, images, testimonies, or stories – has been a powerful medium to keep the revolutionary ethos alive, proving to the world that this ‘event’ existed.

A living tapestry 

We envisioned the introduction of this collection on the act of archiving as both a continuation of this trajectory and a departure from it. Our endeavour sought to capture how archiving infiltrates the way we think, speak, and attempt to write about the revolution – what came before and after – as our own thoughts penetrate facts. The constitution of these archives waives the personal and the collective, the lived and the imagined, the past and the present. 

They are fragments that unfold as a living tapestry – a clock, a song, the sea’s infinite waves, a broken TV, the green buses and a bureaucratic site. Each fragment of our archive vibrates with its own resonance, defying the constraints of order and resisting unified narratives. Each word becomes a gesture of defiance, a refusal to let fleeting moments of hope and despair fade unread. 

Before December 8th, 2024, these fragments were all we had to comprehend a history shaped by loss and exile – to make a claim on time through what was archived and written. But when the unimaginable turns into reality, time returns to the present, carrying the possibility of hope and restoration which also infiltrated our own words. The clock of history ticks once more and time starts to flow again. It reminds us that history – and these archives – are not static repository of “what was”, but a living, creative force that shifts and breathes, bearing the weight of what was and the promise of what could be. New light illuminates spaces of grief and melancholia, fear and humiliation we thought we understood, but never fully grasped. What we once treated as eternal had to be reimagined as the cloth and its threads are now ripped apart.

Writing, archiving

This has been true prior to December 8th, 2024 and, even more, in its aftermath. As we wrote down these archival fragments, we noticed their becoming a conduit through which history is continually reimagined and reshaped. These fragmented archives weave together the disconnected threads of history and breathe life into memory. Time collapses and reforms, no longer linear, but circular, offering moments where endings become beginnings, where loss unfolds into the possibility of renewal. Our act of writing became a transformative vessel, a time machine that navigates the fragile boundaries between memory and the present, contributing to the formation of these archives and their constant reconfiguration.

Writing and archiving are not merely intellectual exercises but emotional and political acts – a refusal to surrender memory to silence. Even objects shed their passivity and become subjects—autonomous, breathing entities. The Citadel of Aleppo evokes childhood – a labyrinth of the past, reshaped by the revolution. A bridge is formed between these sites of memory, embodying both shelter and loss. The loss is palpable in the devastation of Aleppo, but also in the silence of the sea, which carries countless untold stories, dreams of survival, and death. A clock, once silent, begins to tick defiantly, reclaiming lost time from the abyss of forgetting. On the dance floor in Berlin, the echoes of Abdul Baset al-Sarout’s voice merge into a new rhythm, intertwining Syria 2011 with the neon-lit nights of 2019, where past revolutions dissolve into pulsating beats and scattered fragments of hope. 

In our attempt to write down our own archive and archiving our own fragments, we pursued meanings in the chaotic and fragmented expanses of memory. In a world where ruptures and losses shape the surface of history, we search for fragments whose stretching towards each other offer insights into the “how” and “why” amidst the “what.” This search for meanings becomes a vibrant and fluid, at times even fugacious, confrontation with the past. Rather than dwelling in simple explanations, we sought meanings in the ambiguity of experience.

In what follows, dear reader, we share the meanings carried by the echoes of lost voices, pieces of revolution, the bitterness of missed opportunities, the taste of unexpected renewals. Yet, meanings, like archives, remain ever elusive – a fleeting shimmer, a thought we believed we’ve grasped, only to see it slip away. In this pursuit, these archives become spaces of metamorphosis – an ongoing process that confronts us with questions we may never fully answer,  propelling us forward today, as they did yesterday.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Eternity Unwoven: Echoes of the Unwritten and Poetics of the Archive appeared first on Untold.

جنة جنة جنة يا وطنا [Paradise, Paradise, Our Country is Paradise] 

Words and the relentless music penetrate my body, inebriated and exhausted as it rests on a sofa of a semi-stranger, with the only bond we share being Syria. Night eventually descends in summery Berlin, while I am listening countless times to the song Janna Janna remixed by the Syrian-German band Shkoon.

Its beginning and end dissolve into a flow of sounds, words and beats. Darkness reaches the palm frond framing the window, its slow motion devouring every single object of that unfamiliar living room. The night is untamed, almost ruthless, in its carnivorous mission, ingesting my own body and mind, too, until now occupied by the crescendo of the synths and the pounding of the beat. The entire space and myself, the past and the present, dissipate profanely and profoundly.  

***

May 2021, Berlin, a desk

It was not the first time I listened to this song, even to this specific remixed version. As happened to a lot of the traditional musical repertoire, the piece was reinvented with new meanings in March 2011 and became the soundtrack of this historical period, the revolution, after protests sparked in Syria. The song, also, became tied to one of its uncontested icons, Abdul Baset al-Sarout, a young prominent football goalkeeper who had embraced the revolution and led the protests in Homs with his words and presence. He later turned into a Free Syrian Army fighter in the wake of the brutal repression and siege laid down by the al-Assad regime in his hometown, a transformation captured by the documentary Return to Homs by filmmaker Talal Derki. The song and its infinite re-interpretations also became the sonic landmark of my nightlife in the German capital, since my arrival in May 2018. I witnessed its innumerable metamorphosis–that did not scratch its sacred power–in the many Arab parties populating pre-pandemic Berlin. 

***

February 2019, Berlin, a nightclub

An unremarkable winter night. An electro dabke version of the song instigates a powerful energy reverberating on the dancefloor. Squeezed next to each other, partygoers are greeting each other, some others dancing and drinking, others simply chatting. The moment this song starts, this heterogeneous group becomes a single entity. My friend Azad, standing next to me, is also infected by the song and the atmosphere. He starts to shout, singing along. Holding my hand, he initiates a spontaneous dabke line where I follow his voice and body. We ignore the heat, the lack of space and oxygen; we dance, sneaking around single dancers, trying to find an empty spot for our next steps amongst the other chains of people whose hands clasp together. The song is replayed immediately, the energy still inhabiting the room with force as sweating bodies and loud voices continue to move and sing in unison. 

I did not reflect much in that moment about what was happening –as similar to other such moments punctuating my nocturnal life. I just danced, I let myself be carried away by the sound and the vibe. There was no time, space and, even, willingness to dissect the power of the song as it was all about living in the moment, savouring its addictive and hedonistic flavour like an animal starving in the middle of a dying forest. Maybe those moments on the dancefloor were just so cathartic because they were about holding onto something beautiful that was about to end or it had already ended but we were not ready to let go. 

Revolutions never last for an eternity, nor should they. Yet, those moments of pure magic can survive, or we want (we need) them to survive, not to fall down, collapse forever–and us–with them. They always remind me of Eugenio Montale’s poem, I Limoni [The Lemon Trees], his wandering in a noisy city made of cement punctuated by a moment of pure beauty as he suddenly glimpses a lemon tree hidden in the courtyard of a building. Maybe the revolution had the smell of the lemons Montale was desperately seeking, that ultimate treasure that life, the world, and nature can offer to ordinary people. Maybe the paradise–Janna Janna–was Montale’s lemon trees. 

***

October 2022, Berlin, an old kneipe

For Azad, –the friend who held my hand in captivity dancing dabke that night– the song is an allegory of his revolutionary past. Three years after that night; a lifetime after the revolution, we talk about my ideas behind this text. He smiles at me and his partner, with a hint of bitterness, saying that he forgot about that night, but he remembers the song as part of his young self reaching the square to protest, dance, listen to Janna Janna and to fulfill the promise of a different future for Syria. His enduring attempts always failed as the regime’s snipers and their bullets were always faster in dropping the curtains at these rebellious gatherings and claiming some people’s lives in the process. 

***

August 2015, Lebanon, a school courtyard

For me, that dabke reminds me of those evenings spent in the courtyard of the school in the midst of agricultural fields. Created by the Syrian community displaced from rural Homs, the school and its courtyard–situated not far from its informal settlement – became the stage for any sort of event that required a sahra [party]: celebration of an engagement, a wedding or just ordinary life. The singer with his voice and the musician with his electric piano animate those dark nights and their summer breeze amusing the usual crowd while guests arrive from far and not so far away. 

Sometimes, we just listen to his singing, making up impromptu celebratory or ironic lyrics about one of us. Other times, the electro dabke pushes us in the middle of the courtyard/dancefloor as circles of men and women, sometimes mixed, dance not far from children playing around. The atmosphere is not always joyful, nostalgia and melancholia arise amongst a tensed silent audience as his voice recalls the past and what has been lost. 

There was no revolutionary fervor in those summer evenings. Janna Janna and all the other revolutionary songs never made it to the courtyard –to be honest, the revolution seemed to have become a chimera by the time of my arrival in August 2014. Sarout was never mentioned there either. Yet, those moments also were revolutionary in their own essence: they were celebrating the ‘minor struggles’ to be alive and continue to live despite displacement and the devastation of the war. 

***

Berlin, October 2024, a bed

The dancefloor was neither the street nor the courtyard. Yet, Berlin 2019 managed to bring Syria 2011 and Lebanon 2015 back as if we were inside a half-broken TV from the nineties, in which, from time to time, one channel blended with another one –as if time and space collapse making it impossible to distinguish what we were doing, with whom, where and when. The dancefloor, after all, was just a vacuum that helped everyone postpone a sense of an ending and a future repeating an eternal past. After all, this was Berlin, it was not Sarout singing, it was only a remix. Like my friend, I also danced the night away. But that waning dusk on the sofa was different. It was not a time of reckoning the end, but a time of remembering its beginning.  

***

August 2012, London, a crowd, the Syrian embassy

Another Saturday afternoon in front of the Syrian embassy in the most imperial looking parts of Central London. ‘Janna Janna’ is filling the air of those revolutionary protests: we are not Syria, but Syria and the revolution are here. For the young and older generations of Syrians protesting from a distance, this is a moment of hope, euphoria, togetherness until then unimaginable, as fear and silence brought from Syria were carefully cultivated and generationally transmitted even in the diaspora.

I was happy to touch again those moments that were, so far, buried by the passing of time. Yet, they felt more distant than ever, belonging to a parallel universe that crashed in front of the violent reality. 

***

June 2019, Berlin, a computer screen

A week after me lying on that sofa,Sarout died after being wounded in battle between Hama and Idlib. My Facebook newsfeed becomes a reel of mourning for this man and his legacy: the video of him singing during the protests, his interviews and pictures of the funeral attended by thousands of people in Idlib. In Lebanon, members of the Syrian community I lived with commemorated his death, abandoning their usual carefulness in posting anything political and revolutionary at their own very real risk. In Berlin too, the news feels devastating––he was a symbol of the revolution, but almost an embodiment of the Syrian predicament and its contradictions. His death feels like a kitchen knife cutting deeply through the skin and flesh of a finger.

***

November 2024, Berlin

We are no longer on a dancefloor, its darkness and the darkness of the night did not protect us from the reckoning of this bitter end; there weren’t any lemon trees to uncover in any hidden corner. Like the TV of my childhood where white, black and grey lines dominated the screen, eating up one channel and the intrusive other, the feelings, people, years and places belonging to the revolution became mixed up with neither beginning nor end. A dream I did not live but watched in front of a broken TV showcasing fragments of my diaries, fieldnotes and memories. Maybe I can only archive these fragments, making some order and clarity in between these monochromatic lines as a final act of mourning, or as a way to deal with the lingering melancholia. I put a date, a place, I unpack and deconstruct the secret beauty of a lemon tree, the captivating lyrics of Janna Janna, reminding myself that even revolutionary icons like Sarout are human.

***

 7th December 2024, Berlin, Sonneallee/Arab Street,

I am walking towards Sonneallee to catch the bus to go home and watch the speech of Bashar al-Assad that never happened. My friend Nawal and I are stopped by a young boy standing in front of one of the many Syrian patisseries that found their homes in this long avenue. Wearing the Syrian revolutionary flag like the mantle of a superhero, he stands next to an old stereo singing Janna Janna, offering sweets to people passing by to celebrate the imminent fall of Bashar al-Assad. The revolutionary flag reappears in a blink of an eye, worn like an accessory by men walking in the street or attached to the Keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag at the entrance of many shops. 

The day after, even Sarout reappears in flags and posters brought by the jubilant crowd celebrating the collapse of the regime and its eternal aura. I smell again the lemon tree as Janna Janna is blasted in the middle of Kreuzberg, almost symbolizing this surreal moment of touching paradise with the point of that finger, effortlessly, at least for the here and now.

I do not know what to do with this text now that it tells a different ending written only in November from the one we witnessed more recently. I want to delete that part, but I can’t. I am tempted to rewind the tape, letting the interferences in the screen just be what they have been, without any order or logic, to preserve that revolutionary momentum as it was, as it is now, and with it, those who are not here with us, celebrating the many ways in which they also contributed to make the unimaginable and unforeseeable become history. 

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Paradise, interrupted. The archive may not end appeared first on Untold.