Syria, incomplete cartography
Workshop with Catalan authors and Syrian refugees
On 27 January 2017 the Sala Beckett (Barcelona) hosted a meeting with Syrian refugees and Catalan authors, with the support of the European Institute of the Mediterranean. That meeting, which aimed to bring closer theatre and society, made clear that all its participants shared a strong desire to narrate and make public the situation they were going through as people who suffered and still suffer in exile the repression of al-Assad’s regime. A wish to share and be heard, to speak in first person.
Although the Catalan society showcases a strong commitment to take in refugees and has produced many narratives of integration, these are almost always told from the point of view of the subject who offers this integration, but very rarely from the point of view of the integrated one. This situation expresses one of the biggest problems of the current Catalan discourse on shelter: refugees are often thought of and represented as victims, hence in objects deprived of agency, own opinion and judgement. The challenge for our society must then be to understand that what these people ask for above all is the dignity that every human being deserves and the rights that every citizen has.
We named Syria, incomplete cartography the workshop we carried out with them on 2017, and which we tried to shape as a horizontal space for sharing stories, questions and concerns about what is actually happening in Syria, and how each one of them/us relates to it. Part of the stories and materials that came from the workshop were publicly shown in a presentation where each refugee decided with the backing of a dramaturge their own performance format (from giving a lecture to reading a fiction story, or even being absent and sending a letter to explain why).
With Alaa Alden Dalati, Carles Fernández Giua, Enric Nolla, Nour Salameh, Mayyar Skhaita, Victoria Szpunberg, Mohammad Othman “Tattoo”, Helena Tornero, Marc Villanueva Mir, Joan Yago, Meera M. Zaroor
Workshop propelled by Sala Beckett/ Obrador Internacional de Dramatúrgia with the support of Fabulamundi and the collaboration of European Institute of the Mediterranean