Brief
Great storytellers have the power to transport listeners outside of themselves, to other places, times, contexts, etc. Stories that societies celebrate are often shaped by those in power, underrepresented stories often reflect societies’ injustices, and the stories we tell about ourselves shape our identity.
In this project, we will be developing multi-sensory experiences inspired by stories recorded by StoryCorps. “StoryCorps’ mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world. We do this to remind one another of our shared humanity, to strengthen and build the connections between people, to teach the value of listening, and to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters.”
This is not an exhibition design project, this is an experience project. Your goal is to evoke emotions and personal memories in the viewer that mirror or complement your assigned story by stimulating multiple senses.
StoryCorps — Magda Sakaan & Walid Sakaan
Transcript:
Magda Sakaan (MS): I decided, after I graduated college, that I was gonna move to Syria. I’d always wanted to know your family and as soon as I landed, I was home.
Walid Sakaan (WS): I was born in a real old city. It’s built of chiseled limestone with cobblestones on the streets. And when I was young, my older sister, Hamida, she’ll put me on her shoulder and carry me. I remember this as the warmest, warmest moments.
MS: Aunt Hamida, she’d take my phone and look at the pictures of you and just kiss your face on the phone screen and cry. When I first moved there, I had no idea what she was saying but you could understand the love that she had for you.
I went to go for six months and I stayed for four years. So I loved it.
WS: I had to go get you almost out of there.
MS: We both left not thinking that it would be the last time that we’d see a lot of people.
WS: You know, I mean uh… I cannot talk about it without feeling like crying.
Aleppo is one of the oldest cities in the world and a lot of that was destroyed.
MS: All I wanted was to go back and then as it got worse and I realized that wasn’t possible, that was when I really mourned it.
WS: My sister, Hamida is in Syria and you know how much I want to see her. It breaks my heart.
I have these dreams where I go back. And all of us, all my sisters, brothers, all of us are in the old house having a kharouf.
MS: Eating a whole sheep?
WS: The whole sheep. I don’t want it to end [laughter]. I want to close my eyes, realize that it is a dream and I want to go back. But we need to talk about happy things…
Summary and Take Aways:
Magda and Walid Sakaan is a Syrian family that left their home to escape the civil war that erupted in 2011. Walid reminisces about the life he used to live before the war and the memories he shared with his family. He often has dreams about those precious moments and mourns for the home he once knew. Taking these themes of longing, grief, and yearning, I wrote some notes on certain directions I could take to invoke that same feeling for my visitors.
I wanted to emphasize the inability to go back home or to the past within my exhibition. A space you can see but cannot enter. In my preliminary sketch, I created a warm space and a cold space to indicate the change in mood while visitors walk in this space. I was interested in James Turrell’s light sculptures, which has an ethereal and hypnotic nature that brings people closer to the piece.
Besides the visual aspect of my exhibition, I was considering possible audio additions such as adding the song, “The 49th Street Galleria”, by Chris Zabriskie. This song was the same track as the one in my Story Corps video, and the melody matched the feelings of nostalgia and sadness as in the story.
I thought about how to make the viewer feel like they are unable to go back to the space they once inhabited. I created a warm space to be above 3ft that exuded the feelings of home, and as the viewers walk through the space they would exit “home” and step down to arrive at a chilling “outdoor” space. Once they enter this new cold area, the door behind them would close, leaving the viewers to look back up at where they once were.
While talking about this concept with Daphne, it felt a bit too literal and specific to the story. What kind of home would it be? What type of furniture and kitchen? What would the outdoor space look like? Will these interior and exterior designs look like those from Syria? With these questions, I realized that I wanted my space to be universal to everyone, not just to those who are familiar to the architecture and culture of a Syrian home.
To counter this literal design concept, I decided to get rid of a home and outside division and create a spiral wall that make visitors enter an elevated space and exit on the ground level. To represent the feeling of longing that we all share, I took out the cobblestone exterior wall and found a poem by Sara Teasdale. This poem talks about longing, and I wanted to have visuals projected on the walls with the poem glowing in the warm light. But in considering a poem called, “Longing” I quickly felt that this too was another matter-of-fact way of showing my narrative.
With much consideration, I thought of a different plan idea that still had the notion of home in an abstracted form. Rather than created two different spaces with the warm and cold tones, I decide to make the entire exhibit space change into two different phases. Visitors would enter a the exhibit in a yellow, orange toned space and as they circle around the exhibit and come to the center, the space would completely change into a blue gray tone.
I got rid of the poem idea and decided to add simple furnitures that we all know. A light switch, a window, a plant, a musical box, a kitchen, and a table. With this change, I added in a shadow character that will guide guests into the space. This friendly individual will be enthusiastic to invite you in, similarly to a good friend inviting you to their home for the first time.
As you enter the space, the shadow will make you feel at home by turning on the lights, opening up the curtains, turning on music, putting on coffee, and sitting down for a good conversation. At the middle of the exhibit space with the table and chair, the visitor will sit in front of the shadow and be surprised by a loud overhead airplane sound. This may be the most literal representation of war throughout the experience. At this turning point, the shadow will run scared, and the entire mood of the exhibit will change. The once warm space, will turn cold. The music is off, the lights are dim and blue, the walls will have small dents and cracks, the windows cracked with a view of a dry and broken down environment. Such a drastic and quick change will emphasize the warmth that was present mere seconds ago, and as the guest circles back out of the space, feelings of grief and longing will be represented by this cold and dark space.
After completing my storyboard and figuring out the general interactions in each room, I decided to figure out ways to render out this idea in a digital form. I used Sketchup to prototype the room and add furniture that correlate with the plan. Afterwards, I exported the file into Adobe Dimension to finalize the warm tone look.
It was tricky finding the right lighting and angle for this scene, because it was important to highlight each furniture without blending them into the walls or ground tiles.
After rendering the entire space, it was time to render out each of the walls where the shadow would interact with the viewer. For the shadow component, I took photos of my body and videos to act out how each scene would play out.
I then transferred that file into adobe after effects and layered it on top of the initial renders of the wall exhibit space. After layering the two images, I exported the finalized video into Adobe Premiere Pro to add audio into my visualizations. Here are some of the final looks:
After the warm space was complete, I edited the frames without the shadow figure on Photoshop to create the cold hues in the second phase of the exhibition.
By having these two very contrasting environments, viewers are able to see how drastic the change is after the climax part of the exhibit.
Conclusion & Reflection
The shadow represents our past memories of friends and family. They are those who are not with us in the present but in our recollections. Like the story of the Sakaan family, guests are reminded of how quickly life can change in a matter of minutes. We all have experienced the loss of a loved one, a friendship, or even a home. This exhibition is designed to remind us of these feelings of grief, yearning, and nostalgia with the hopes of encouraging visitors to be present and grateful of the moment.
This project as a whole was a fun experience to think about. Conceptually speaking, it was hard to think of a fluid way to showcase a warm and cold environment in a small 20ft by 20ft room, but once I considered how the walkthrough would occur, the change in atmosphere made the exhibit speak louder in its new format. Moving forward, I would like to rethink about the individual interactions guests would have with the shadow. More specifically on how the people would know to pick up the coffee, or adding more pictures and photographs throughout the area to make the space feel more like home.
