Design of Necessity

A satellite dish is designed to receive signals. Under siege in Syria, it was made to receive the sun. When fuel and electricity were cut off, communities lined satellite dishes with mirror fragments to concentrate sunlight to heat water and food.

In underground shelters, mushrooms were cultivated because they required little light, as the Assad regime was raining barrel bombs on besieged communities. Knowledge of these techniques circulated between households and besieged areas, forming provisional infrastructures of food, energy and collective care.

These practices are the starting point for Design of Necessity. The title names an asymmetry. The Assad regime produced necessity, and those subjected to these conditions designed what they could against them. The resulting objects carry both histories: the violence that made them necessary and the collective intelligence that made survival possible.

Design of Necessity refuses the familiar humanitarian narrative in which the mechanisms of violence recede behind an uplifting celebration of resilience. The project instead asks what happens when objects first devised to sustain life enter the protected space of art. What changes when a survival apparatus becomes a sculpture? What is made visible, and what risks being lost, when knowledge produced under siege is translated for an audience elsewhere?

Presented across the interior and exterior of the socially engaged Maria Church in Copenhagen, the project brought reconstructed solar devices, living mushroom cultivation, self-portraiture, documentary photography, literature, film, music and collective gatherings into a single spatial and social constellation.

The exhibition did not attempt to reconstruct the experience of siege. No installation in Copenhagen could reproduce the conditions from which these practices emerged. That distance was not concealed; it became one of the project’s central materials.

Outside the church, mirror-lined satellite dishes and suspended cooking vessels were assembled into an eight-metre tower. The structure retained the silhouette of communications infrastructure while its fractured surfaces caught the square, the sky and the bodies moving around it. The satellite dish occupied several political and material lives at once: a receiver of distant signals, a solar apparatus, a domestic object stigmatised in European migrant neighbourhoods, and a reflective surface through which a person might construct an image of themselves.

Entering the church required visitors to pass through a fabric threshold printed with two photographs. One showed Palestinians in Yarmouk waiting for food distribution during the siege of the camp. The other showed an underground shelter excavated in Douma, Eastern Ghouta, as protection from bombardment. A building associated with sanctuary was thus entered through images of places where sanctuary had been systematically destroyed or forced underground.

The project developed through a five-day workshop with twelve Syrian participants living in Denmark. Together, they reconstructed the mirror-lined dishes and used their surfaces to make self-portraits. Enlarged and printed on fabric, the resulting images formed the series Shattered Image of Oneself.

The fracture in these portraits belongs to the apparatus of representation, not to the people represented. No single viewpoint can resolve the reflected face into a stable whole. The works resist the narrow visual positions assigned to Syrians within dominant European media: humanitarianised as victims or securitised as threats. Rather than appearing as illustrations of a crisis or representatives of an undifferentiated community, the participants determine the conditions of their own visibility. They return the gaze through an image that refuses to become singular, complete or easily consumed.

The workshop’s participants each took a self-portrait using their reflections in the shattered, recomposed mirrors on the satellite dishes, which were hung inside the church for the exhibition taking over the space. These portraits communicate the shattered images of selves and communities that Syrians carry after years of political repression, siege, starvation, forced disappearance, and forced displacement. The photographs also serve as a reminder that Western media rarely, if ever, represent Syrians as a complete image: either victims or threats, Syrians are not permitted to appear as full, complex human beings.

Inside the church, bags of mushrooms continued to grow throughout the exhibition. Titled Rooted Communities, the living installation introduced cultivation, maintenance, smell and decay into a space otherwise structured by images and objects. It recalled the agricultural knowledge developed in underground spaces during a siege, while refusing to turn that knowledge into a static symbol. The work remained dependent upon watering, attention, and care.

The project’s engagement with photographic testimony continued through Images of the Image-Makers, co-curated with Syrian-Kurdish photographer, filmmaker and producer Guevara Namer.Twelve photographers who had lived through and documented different sieges from within were each asked to select a single photograph from archives containing tens of thousands of images produced over many years. Accompanied by a short contextual text, each selection shifted attention from the accumulation of evidence to the photographer’s act of choosing: what one image could carry without being made to represent the whole.

Installed on the church pews, the photographs and texts occupied a space organised around assembly, listening and collective witness. Reproduced as postcards, they could also leave the exhibition and circulate as portable testimonies.

• Photographers are:
  • Abd Doumany /// Siege of Douma, Jan 2013 - Mar 2018
  • Ameer Al Halbi /// Siege of Aleppo, Mar 2016 - Dec 2016
  • Aref Tammawi /// Siege of Aleppo, Mar 2016 - Dec 2016
  • Bassam Al Hakeem /// Siege of Douma, Jan 2018 - Mar 2018
  • Bassel Tl /// Siege of Homs, Jun 2012 - May 2014
  • Diya Khattab /// Siege of Homs, Jun 2012 - May 2014
  • Moayad Zaghmout /// Siege of Yarmouk Camp, Jul 2013 - Mar 2014
  • Mohammed Badra /// Siege of Douma, Jan 2013 - Mar 2018
  • Mohammed Abdullah /// Siege of Eastern Ghouta, Dec 2012 - Aug 2014
  • Mouhamad Abo Kasem /// Siege of South Damascus, Jul 2013 - Mar 2014
  • Rami Muhammad Mahouk /// Siege of Yarmouk, Jul 2013 - Mar 2014
  • Wissam Khattab Shahleh /// Siege of South Damascus Camp, Jul 2013 - Mar 2014

A further strand of the project placed siege in relation to imprisonment, forced disappearance and exile, treating them not as separate experiences but as connected technologies of enclosure.

At its centre was a photograph of a doll made by Nada, who had survived siege, detention, torture and rape, followed by displacement and the gendered stigma imposed on women after imprisonment. When speaking openly about what had happened was not possible, she created the doll as an indirect means of telling her story, with the support of Marona, an organisation based in Idlib.

Under the eyes of Nada’s doll, the audience read in silence in the church pews. Their silence carried the knowledge of connection: Nada and her companions at Marona had been informed that, at that moment in Copenhagen, an audience of strangers was receiving and bearing witness to her story.

Developed with researcher Dr Anne-Marie McManus and Syrian prison researcher and novelist Jaber Baker, the literary programme brought together Syrian prison writing from different generations. It included poetry by Faraj Bayrakdar, who was arrested in 1987 and imprisoned by the Syrian state for almost fourteen years, in Arabic, English, and Danish.

In the framework of the exhibition‭, ‬and in cooperation with Cinemateket and Syrian Doc Days‭, ‬three internationally recognised films were screened‭, ‬followed by a group discussions that centred on each film’s topic‭.‬
‍
For Sama — by Waad al-Kateab‭(‬100‭ ‬min‭, ‬Danish subtitles‭)‬The film was introduced by Lise Christina Rasmussen‭, ‬the pastor of‭  ‬Mariakirken Vesterbro and the co-developer of The Maria Projektet‭.‬

Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege‭ ‬—‭ ‬by‭ ‬Abdallah Al-Khatib‭(‬89‭ ‬min‭, ‬Danish subtitles‭)‬The film was introduced by Matthias Borello‭, ‬a writer‭, ‬editor‭, ‬and the curator of The Maria Projektet

FLEE‭ ‬—‭ ‬by‭ ‬Jonas Poher Rasmussen‭ ‬‭(‬90‭ ‬min‭, ‬Danish subtitles‭). ‬The film was introduced by Salwa Barlian‭, ‬the Senior Legal Adviser from the‭ ‬Danish Refugee Council’s Asylum Department‭.‬

The project culminated in After the Last Supper, a situational performance organised around a collective meal. Mushrooms cultivated inside the church were prepared and served at a shared table, returning part of the exhibition from representation to use. Artists, activists, researchers, journalists, politicians and members of civil-society organisations gathered to discuss siege, displacement, asylum and accountability.

The meal did not propose conviviality as a substitute for justice. A shared table cannot repair political violence. It can, however, become a temporary civic structure: a place where experiences are articulated, positions confronted and memory carried into public speech.

On the 28th of August, Design of Necessity hosted the graduation event of DFUNK, a local association that helps who have fled to Denmark live a safe and stable youth life with equal rights, focusing on young people.