Jannah was a 1 week pop-up installation, set up in a derelict cottage in Menlo, Galway, in May 2022.

The visitor is invited to put on earphones, and follow a recorded voice telling them the story of a far away country that has disappeared, a place that the narrator is trying to remember by patching-up old images, scents, scenes. The voices guides the visitor , asking him to wait, look, enter, listen to the end of the story after leaving the house.

Inside the house are old objects brought back from Syria, some coffee left on the table unfinished, as if the inhabitants had left suddenly.

Voices emerge from domestic objects, telling the story of this country, in Arabic and English: they belong to members of the same family, scattered across 3 continents. Some emigrated decades before the war, some escaped it for a life in exile, some remained. Each one remembers the place differently. They each chose a song that reminds them of life before the war.

The scent of Jasmine, that the narrator remembers filling the country of her childhood, mingles with the smell of old soot from the old cottage’s fireplace.

On suspended laundry hung within the walls, a video is projected, taken from a mobile phone: it is the family dancing on a summer afternoon, most of its members reunited for a short moment. the footage is slowed down