Gardens Speak
The Bairro Alto Theatre, which is not in Bairro Alto (but almost), will soon reopen. It is a new municipal theatre in Lisbon. In the meantime, we are already getting started: first online and now across the city with a series of events taking place between day and night, the ground and the sky, nearby and faraway; so that we can look and listen while we are standing still or moving, upright or lying on the ground, or even sitting in chairs. For now, nothing we are planning is in the theatre (but close by); and nothing will be actual theatre, but intimate and unusual moments that rethink and transform everything that surrounds them.
Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation by Lebanese artists Tania El Khoury containing the oral histories of ten people buried in Syrian gardens.
These domestic burials of activists and protesters play out a continuing collaboration between the living and the dead. The dead protect the living by not exposing them to further danger at the hands of the regime. The living protect the dead by conserving their identities, telling their stories, and not allowing their deaths to become instruments to the regime.