Syrian Digital Memory

(Re-)Humanization of the Syrian digital memory

Our project aims to investigate the “meaning(s)” of the so called “Syrian Digital Memory” of the 2011 uprising and its subsequent war. The Syrian case sheds light on how civilians’ documentary practices and experiences have significantly contributed to the production of multi-source digital testimonies within diverse and constantly transforming local, social, political and organisational contexts.

With the aim to unearth different and possible ways to deconstruct these digital testimonies of uprising and war, we consider the individual memories and narratives formed by survivors of the humanitarian disaster as an essential and indispensable source in discovering the subjective dimensions of this national disaster.

Individuals in Syria have produced not only archival and documentary digital “copies” of their everyday lives during war but have also provided digital extracts and quick flashes of the real individual and collective memories of the war and its significant events.

After nearly nine years since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, the spatial context of these digital memories are still inaccessible as Syrians are scattered inside and outside Syrian due to exile, migration and displacement.

By conducting autobiographical-narrative interviews with Syrian digital content producers, we aim to contextualise and re-humanise the digital memories of the Syrian uprising and conflict through the everyday, social, individual and collective memories of their producers, as surviving eyewitnesses of atrocities. Examining the influence of the digital on the physical and vice versa, this project insists to treat remembrance not merely as a recollection of memories and facts, but as a continuous process of reconfiguration of the memory across time and space.