"Transmission 1987"

Written and Directed by: Qusay Awad; Scripted Voice Text: Rasha Abbas; Sound Design: Dhia Douss; Editing: Rand Abou Fakher

"Transmission 1987" is a multimedia installation and spatial investigation that explores the Syrian landscape as a living archive of disappearance, extraction, and buried memory.

The project departs from the figure of Muhammad Faris, the first Syrian astronaut, who travelled to space aboard the Soviet mission Soyuz TM-3. During a phone call with President Hafez al-Assad at the time, Faris was asked: “What do you see from such a great height above the Earth?” From this conversation, his orbital gaze over Syria in 1987 becomes a point of temporal rupture. Through a speculative voice-over that reimagines his perspective, the work asks what it means to look once again at a homeland whose geography has been transformed by war, mass graves, foreign military infrastructures, and systems of spatial control.

Using satellite imagery, archival footage, field recordings, and digitally reconstructed landscapes, "Transmission 1987" investigates the relationship between visibility, surveillance and erasure. The earth appears simultaneously as witness, evidence, and medium, recording political violence through scars, excavations, architectural repetition, and altered topographies.

The complete work will be exhibited at eCommemoration’s Transgressive Memory Festival 12 & 13 September 2026.

Qusay Awad (b. As-Suwayda, Syria) is a Berlin-based architect and multidisciplinary artist whose work spans spatial investigation, film, sound and performance. Through speculative and researchdriven environments, he explores how memory, violence, and power become embedded within landscape and architecture. His work has been presented internationally across exhibitions, festivals, and institutional contexts.

Two guest artists, three institutions, three academic advisors and one goal: breaking new ground for memorializing history in the digital age. Initiated by Körber-Stiftung’s eCommemoration programme, in 2025 the newly founded Immersive History Lab invited two guest artists working at the crossroads of arts and media to commence groundbreaking research – investigating how memorialization and public confrontation with history can look like in the future. Therefore, the Immersive History Lab provided starting grants for each guest artist to work on a best practice experience that creates new access points to memory culture and self-reflective and self-critical commemorative practices in the digital era.

The concept of a lab ensured that research and project outcomes corresponded: an environment, where ideas can be tested and intensely discussed, allows for a robust finished project, whose starting point, spheres of influence, and final outcome concur with our theoretical and practical demands. This is particularly important in the field of commemorative culture as new forms of remembrance need to be assessed and as we observe a general fatigue in regards to conventional forms of memorialisation.

The Immersive History Lab brought together artistic practice, academic reflection and institutional expertise to rethink how societies can meaningfully engage with the past under contemporary conditions of digital saturation, commemorative fatigue and global polycrises. By treating history not as a closed body of facts, but as a contested, narrative and experiential field, the IHL demonstrated how immersive digital approaches are able to open new spaces for self-determined learning, critical reflection and ethical responsibility. In dialogue with theories from Hayden White to Saidiya Hartman, and through concrete artistic research projects, the IHL positioned digital arts as a vital corrective to top-down memory politics, embracing multivocality, collective participation and neglected knowledge. Rather than offering definitive answers, the Immersive History Lab foregrounded history as a living process: a site where confronting the past becomes a practice of orientation toward the present and a shared, yet open, future.