Humanizing
Information Exhibition:
Visualizing the Forgotten
Humanizing the Forgotten confronts the human cost of the Syrian Civil War, widely called the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century.
This sculpture uses nearly 10,000 cards, stacked in piles, to embody the catastrophic number of Syrian casualties. Each card holds an accurate number of circles, together representing the number of deaths that had occurred up until the date of this exhibition.
On the front of each card, the circles represent 54 of the 470,000 Syrians who died as a result of the Syrian crisis, with one circle highlighted in red and left unlabeled. On the back, that same red circle stands alone, identifying the name of the Syrian it represents. This side tells a more detailed story of the person's death, in a paragraph that ends mid-sentence, a metaphor for how their lives ended abruptly.
Viewers are invited to come closer and interact with the crisis's data in a way a screen doesn't allow, and are encouraged to take a card with them. The more people interact with the pile, the messier it becomes, another intentional metaphor, this time for the messiness of war. The pile itself also stands in as a miniature Syrian city: as more visitors take cards, the city slowly fades and crumbles, one card at a time.
