Threatening Skies
Throughout my experience as a student in Manchester, I went through situations and choices that led me to see some aspects of my life in a new light.
For five months, I had no chance to see the sun or the sky from my accommodation room. When I finally moved to another room, I felt like I was seeing the sky for the first time.
The view of airplanes cutting through the spring clouds reminded me of my childhood memories of flying above the clouds. Later, before I had the valuable chance to study again, I dreamed of the airplane that would take me to my new life, where I could study, build new hopes, and weave my dreams into reality.
That experience led me to the question:
What does the airplane mean for other people? What could be the memory of those who lived under a threatening sky?
Let's say the "size" of a sound is the three-dimensional region across which it is audible and acknowledged as a sound in and of itself. In this sense, most sounds, at least most of the noises that we notice, are "larger" than we are (Daughtry, 2014). The main aim is to create a soundscape and sound recordings showcasing life under aerial bombing in Gaza and Syria, based on the experiences of two participants.
Sounds have a big presence in space and in normal daily life. We can close our eyes to choose not to see, but we cannot close our ears and stop them from hearing any favorable or unfavorable sounds, even while we are sleeping.
The sound recording interview inspired the process of the collage art method. I met the first participant, H, with the ideas he gave me about his life in Syria under the situation of the revolution, war, aircraft bombing, his journey to the UK, and the trauma he experienced. This gave me the chance to offer him the collage method as a tool to recreate or restructure his memories. One of the ideas was the act of resisting through art, and I offered to be their mediator, the one who would apply their thoughts and ideas to the graphic program we used. The same happened with the second participant, A, from Gaza.
