Revenant: Witnessing the ghosts of Syria's war.

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Jacques Derrida maintained that because of the failure of language and tradition, some of the greatest phenomena in the western world are dismissed too soon.  The phenomena that captured Derrida’s thoughts and imagination were spectres, ghosts and haunting.  He saw these as omnipresent in contemporary life - in the everyday experience of telephones and television, movies and art.  For Derrida, ghosts and spectres are critical and problematic things that remained ‘difficult to name:  neither soul nor body, and both one and the other'.  Derrida encouraged academics and scholars to set aside their fears and traditions to begin a dialogue and discourse with ghosts, so as to understand why they return as symbolic liveable representations, and to determine what they want from us and what they have to tell us.  

This project responds to Derrida’s call to communicate with 'ghosts'.  The work emerged from an interdiscipline of art practice research and a collaboration between three independent practitioners.  Through the power of the Internet, the projectbbrought together three individuals with differing backgrounds and methods of capturing the ghost images of the war in Syria.  These are:  a UK visual artist who working remotely interpreted the war in Syria via the Internet and a computer screen; a Syrian photographer who recorded the violence of war first hand; and a Syrian/Palestinian musician who played a concerto for peace in the streets of Yarmouk where he lived so as to inspire, and give hope to the Syrian and Palestinian people.  All three artists worked independently and have never met or spoken, other than through the Internet.