Floating Homes: Art exhibition in France highlights Syrian stories of displacement

Architect explains how his project, now on display in a French museum, unearthed heartfelt memories from families uprooted by war, earthquakes and colonialists

With transcribed interviews and models crafted out of clay and soap, Floating Homes detail stories of displacement dating back to the early 20th century. Photo: Sammy Zarka

When Sammy Zarka visited a Roman-era farm villa in southern France in October, he found a perplexing quality in its 2,000-year-old mosaics.

The Syrian architect was visiting the archaeological site in Loupian, near Montpellier, to prepare artwork for an annual exhibition at the villa’s museum. Zarka had initially sought to create something to reflect on “the imagined notion of oneself through archaeology,” he says. However, he reconsidered the project once he saw the mosaics and learnt more about their history.

The villa’s mosaics seemed out of place in France. They featured vine motifs and geometric patterns that, to Zarka, seemed familiar. The mosaics, Zarka later discovered, were made by Syrian artisans.

This revelation glossed the mosaics with a poetic sheen. Here was the work of artisans who had travelled thousands of kilometres at a time when such distances seemed untraversable, and they had brought pieces of Syria with them to France. The discovery prompted Zarka to ask himself: “Who are the Syrians who live here now?”

“There are Syrians all over the world, right?” he asks, adding that he anticipated having no trouble finding a community of Syrians who lived in the area. Sure enough, Zarka met 15 Syrian families who lived in Loupian and its surrounding area. “I interviewed them spontaneously, not knowing what I was going to work on.”

The interviews left a marked impact on Zarka. “It was already a very emotionally charged period,” he says, referencing the Israel-Gaza war, which had began weeks before Zarka began conducting interviews. “It was like something of the same type happening.”

Zarka's exhibition, titled Floating Homes, runs at the Musee Gallo-Romain Villa Loupian until October 7. The exhibition booklet also includes a dedication “to the millions searching for a home and stands as an open challenge to those who have the power to commit violence against them”.

Zarka says the interviews were different every time and they each brought unexpected narratives. The architect had initially wanted his interviewees to depict their past homes room by room. He was interested in their material details, which he could apply in the models. However, he soon found each person he interviewed had their own conception of home and how to present their memories.

“I wanted people to tell me about their houses. Some of them completely ignored the rooms and spoke about people,” he says. “Some of them talked about the village. Five out of 15 cried while being interviewed. It was so difficult, and made me reconsider what I was doing.”

Being a Syrian helped facilitate Zarka’s interviews he says. “But with every single person I had dreams and nightmares about their paths. I saw myself moving from one house to another, sleeping on the ground as a refugee with the families.”

Zarka himself grew up in Damascus, leaving the city for Italy for his studies just as the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011. “When I left Syria, I wanted to completely disconnect,” he says. “I disconnected from who I was. I was 20 years old. It took me five years to reconnect.”

In some way, the art project came as a stride in that reconciliation process, perhaps for Zarka as well as his interviewees.

Nevertheless, during the interviews, a commonality became evident between the way artisans had brought their craftsmanship to France in the second century, and how the Syrian families – most of whom settled in the area following the civil war – brought their own wisps of home with them.

The architect has now returned to the villa to present an exhibition on this very topic. The Floating Homes exhibition delves into the process of homemaking in the face of displacement, evoking thought-provoking points surrounding architecture and archaeology in the process.

At its core, Floating Homes examines how displaced persons carry within them vestiges of the homes they left behind, and how this influences the ways they adapt to and rebuild in their new surroundings. The exhibition does so through model homes, which, along with the transcribed interviews printed on the exhibition booklet, detail stories of displacement dating back to the early 20th century.

The mosaic floor is a key component of the exhibition. In an installation named Fragmented Myths, broken pieces of 15 clay model homes have been carefully scattered on top of the missing spots of the mosaic. Zarka built the models based on his interviews.

He then destroyed the models before scattering them across the mosaic. This fragmentation hearkens back to the how their actual counterparts have been broken down, either by the war, the 2023 earthquake, or by wilting memories. “It's as if the new destruction is covering the old archaeology,” Zarka says.

Fragmented Myths brings together the 15 stories that informed Floating Homes. Most of the other pieces that come as part of the exhibition delve into these individual narratives, each of which provide emotive and pensive insights to the experience of displacement.

Floating Homes, the work that gave the exhibition its title, presents a story of serial displacement. Zarka based this artwork on a conversation he had with a Syrian woman that the exhibition introduces as Sarah.

The soap model comprising the artwork is based on the Damascus home of Sarah's grandmother, Zakyeh. Zakyeh was among those who fled Gaza, Palestine in 1948, during the Nakba, moving first to Quneitra, a city in Syria that Israel destroyed in 1974, before relocating again to Damascus.

Zarka crafted the model based on descriptions and drawings of the Damascus home that Sarah provided. The soap model depicts a courtyard flanked by two structures. The centre of the courtyard features a fountain, a typical element in the old houses of the Syrian capital.

It is then fitting that the model is displayed in a pool of water in the ancient villa. As the soap sculpture will gradually melt in the water, Zarka will work to create a replacement, replacing the model throughout the duration of the exhibition. Zarka will craft the new models from the same mould. As such, the sculptures will inevitably come out looking differently each time.

The work Imagine a house covered with flowers derives its title from the wallpaper that adorned the Gaziantep home of the Halabi family, who moved to the Turkish city from Aleppo in 2013. The artwork’s title is derived from a line that Mahmoud Halabi told Zarka while depicting the apartment his family had left behind following the 2023 earthquake. Besides a clay model of the home, the artwork features strips of floral print covering a wall, alluding to the wallpaper in the Gaziantep apartment.

While the artworks presenting in Floating Homes offer searing visual artefacts of narratives of displacement, it is the transcribed interviews in the exhibition booklet that augments the significance of each of the pieces. The interviews are replete with moving memories of lost homes, of attempts to recreate what families left behind through meals, scents and traditions.

They detail stories of chained displacements as families moved from Syria to Lebanon and Egypt, to Turkey and elsewhere before settling in France. One particularly arresting work is Palmyra One Step Away. It highlights the story of a family who lived in the ancient city of Palmyra for centuries, before being forcibly displaced in 1932 by French archeologists who had come to the study the city.

Another highlight of the exhibition is the installation Faceless Towers. The work comprises stacked clay bricks that are fitted with replicas of Palmyra reliefs. Recycled plastic flowers, sourced from destroyed Damascene suburbs, were used in making the models. The work alludes to the towers of the Palmyran necropolis, which has been looted and largely destroyed.

Besides Fragmented Myths, there is another work that brings together the 15 stories highlighted in Floating Homes. Disturbed Maps features 15 hand-drawn maps stacked on top of each other. The work is not displayed at the Gallo-Romain Villa but rather on the exterior wall of Espace o25rjj, the residency in Loupian where Zarka developed the project.

In a way, Zarka says he hopes Floating Homes will highlight the importance of interviews in postwar recovery projects. Zarka is continuing to research the ethics of reconstruction, something he began when studying in Italy.

“In order to do something, you need to understand what happened,” he says. “To understand what happened, a lot of people need to be involved in mapping and working on an effective participatory way of intervening.”

He adds that interviews with those affected by conflict are vital if long-lasting recovery projects are to be carried out effectively in southern France, the Arab world and beyond.

Floating Homes is running at the Musee Gallo-Romain Villa Loupian until October 7