What if the Syrian population were to emigrate to Mars?

What would they take with them? How would they remember a culture that had lost its home, its objects, and its everyday rituals through destruction and flight? These are the questions Polish-Syrian designer Anna Banout (b.1993) ponders as she crafted this artistic experiment. As her starting point, she takes the 1987 space flight of the first Syrian cosmonaut, Mohamed Ahmed Faris, and imagines how in 100 years, the traditional and culture f Syria arrives on the planet Mars. On this mysterious planet, which mankind has sought to explore, define, and even inhabit over the past decade, there actually happens to be an area named Syria Planum, which has long fascinated Banout.

In the exhibition Syria 2087, Banout creates a ‘memory box’ of future souvenir objects that will capture the cultural identity of Syria lives, while at the same time the population is exploring and establishing a new world and life on Mars. She opts for objects that embody deep historical layers, narratives, and practices from contemporary Syrian culture and also incorporates the planet Mars into their design through mythical and fictional motifs. The objects are intended to be freely interpreted on a singular basis or combined to enable the culture of remembrance to be experienced through these few objects. She juxtaposes these objects with Syrian cultural exhibits from the MKG collection.

In Syria 2087, Anna Banout thus devises by means of speculative design a way of conjoining her own culture with the identity-defining experiences of a new beginning.

The designer draws on historical cultural artefacts uncovered by archaeology, traditional everyday objects in Syria, and items from MMKG’s collection that related to cultural values, rituals, or historical events as inspiration for the newly designed objects. Eye amulets — everyday objects found in an early excavation of the ancient Syrian city of Tell Brak in 1936 whose use is still being researched today – remind Banout of the alien E.T.. A newly designed bread stamp, once a traditional emblem of the bakery trade, shows images of Mars and its moons Deimos and Phobos and becomes a symbol of the exhibition with its reference to the imaginary new world. A clay model takes its cue from simple historical domed buildings made of clay, a style that Persian architect Nader Khalili (1936–2008) revived in the 1980s. The simple dwellings could be a template for possible settlements on Mars.

With references to historical events as well as fictional or mythical motifs, Anna Banout sees her experiment as part of the great narrative of man’s quest since antiquity to come to terms with his role in the universe. Inspired by the footprint left by astronaut Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) on the moon in 1969, she uses cuneiform to engrave onto a rock the coordinates of the Syria Planum on Mars. The dust-covered surface of the moon is very similar to that of Mars and reminds the designer of the Syrian Desert. The area was given its name, however, by the first cartographer of Mars, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910). In 1877, he took the geography of the Greek legend recounted in Homer’s Iliad and transferred it onto Mars. Indeed, as Anna Banout found out, an asteroid fell to earth in Syria the very same year. By linking these images and events in one object, Banout plays with the notion that things and occurrences are linked beyond time and space, bearing in them historical, current, and future memories.

The designer couples an enchanted cup whose Aramaic magic formulas are supposed to scare away nightmares when you drink from it with a mocha cup and the ritual of divination by reading coffee grounds. Instead of magic formulas, she has engraved a filigree map of the surface of Mars into the new object. In this way, she combines traditional customs with the new lifeworld and lends the object another layer of meaning: It refers to the Voyager Golden Records, which were carried into outer space with the American interstellar space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977. The two gold-plated copper plates contain data and information about humankind for intelligent aliens. Thus, Banout condenses in this object the confrontation with the future and with utopias, and also the currently much-discussed futurism in Arab art.

Anna Banout is the first artist whose intervention truly marks a shift in the focus of the MKG Islamic Art Collection onto contemporary creative practice and design. The big question here is how museums are to exhibit Islamic art in the future in a way that creates opportunities for discussion in an increasingly polarized environment. MKG views Banout’s powerful imagination and eagerness to experiment as a valuable impetus for a re-evaluation of the collection with the goal of not merely looking at the artworks as historical objects but also lending them new meanings. Banout’s project opens up new spaces for sharing experiences and the production of knowledge that go far beyond traditional exhibition activity.

The Syria 2087. Fossils of the Future exhibition is on from now until April 25, 2021, at The Museum of Arts and Crafts (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe — MKG) in Hamburg, Germany.

Photography

Anna Banout (*1993)
Fossilien der Zukunft | Fossils of the Future
© Kinga Budnik/Anna Banout