MUTE

MUTE is an adaptable, site-specific public art installation in the form of a demonstration that moves across political and geographical intersectional contexts. Capturing the momentum, magnetism, and political power of demonstrations in Syria in 2011, the 49 figures are dressed in the ordinary clothes of Syrian activists living in the diaspora, which were collected through an open call. Recalling the tactics protestors used to avoid capture by state security forces in Syria, the figures’ dark clothing allows them to blend anonymously into crowds.

The heads were decapitated and reconstructed to look inside the bodies, bringing back all the memories, traumas, and anguish, turning the faces into horn-like openings that screamed everything that had passed and maximising the voices one day muted. The hands are also missing, leaving holes at the wrists of arms upheld in protest against the torture, killing, and absenteeism of people. Swinging between stillness and motion, these protestors are frozen in postures that evoke the demonstrations' physical tension and emotional intensity.

The motivation for MUTE was born after 2015. The newly arrived Syrians shifted their protests to German streets using the same words and gestures they had developed in the peaceful protest movement that began in Syria. This was a way to find one’s bearings and a sense of belonging in European space and to build a community in exile. However, since the context was different, these protests by "others" were an ordinary sight for passersby, drawing little curiosity or attention; they kept to their paths without glancing at the protestors shouting in a strange language. The idea behind MUTE began at that moment.

The collective movement of Syrians on German streets asserted a connection between here (Europe) and there (Syria), as well as between the past and the present. Faithful to this spirit of connection, MUTE opens, in each of its installations, a relation between the memory of protest in Syria and its present surroundings. Like the repertoire of protest it instantiates, MUTE is mobile: the figures can be transported by van and installed in new contexts. And in each new setting, the protestors wordlessly enact a relationship to the place and its politics, as well as active connections with local activists and communities.

The MUTE's first public appearance was a demonstration outside the Higher Court in Koblenz, Germany. The historic trial was the first time any Syrian regime official was held accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity. During that time, a curfew was still in effect due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the 23rd of April 2020, the first international criminal trial on war crimes and state torture in Syria began in Koblenz, Germany. The Higher Regional Court in Koblenz charged two former officials of President Bashar al-Assad’s security apparatus with crimes against humanity. The two perpetrators had come to Germany a few years earlier in search of asylum, after having announced their defection from the Syrian regime.

In early 2020, concurrently with the trial, many countries around the world imposed measures requiring millions of people to stay at home and adhere to social distancing guidelines due to the spread of COVID-19. These measures, which restricted the movement of individuals and all forms of social gathering, prevented activists and the families of detainees and the disappeared from attending the court proceedings.

Provoked by these difficult circumstances and to make Syrians’ ongoing struggle for justice visible, MUTE was placed on the grass outside the courthouse, in full view of the courtroom windows, while the trial was underway.

The action was inspired in part by Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts that followed Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. It instituted a community-led justice system where, in recognition of the vast number of crimes committed, which would have taken some 200 years to process through the legal system, laypeople were authorised to participate in the jurisdiction. Though controversial, the Gacaca courts nonetheless empowered ordinary people and communities to engage with questions of justice in the aftermath of mass violence. Rwandan Minister of Justice, Johnston Busingye, gave advice to the Syrians, whose country is witnessing a genocide similar to the Rwandan situation, calling on them to rely on their own judicial system to achieve justice and not to wait for the international community's move. Therefore, MUTE has evolved into an alternative, parallel trial space outside the official court system.

MUTE appeared for the first time in Berlin, a city that hosts one of the largest populations of Syrian refugees in Europe. The installation happened on the 10th anniversary of the Syrian Uprising and as a response to the German Minister of the Interior's decision to lift the ban on deportations of Syrians.

In 2021, a political decision was taken in Germany to lift the ban on deportations of Syrians who committed crimes or are suspected of plotting terrorist acts, although the German legal system has proved that crimes against humanity were committed in Syria. No one should be deported to a torture state. The silent demonstration was a reminder that if the Koblenz trial is one first step toward justice, deportations to Syria would only echo hundreds of steps in the other direction.

Supported by Studio Khaled Barakeh, in cooperation with Families for Freedom and Adopt a Revolution.
Photos credits: Guevara Namer, and Khaled Barakeh