Across Syria, many gardens conceal the dead bodies of activists and protesters who adorned the streets during the early periods of the uprising. These domestic burials 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 of the regime.

Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation containing the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in Syrian gardens. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the deceased’s friends and family members to retell their stories as they themselves may have recounted them. This book contains the narrative text of those ten oral histories in both English and spoken Arabic. It includes an acknowledgment and introduction by the artist and illustrations of the audience experience in Gardens Speak. -Publisher