The exhibition Broken cities. A virtual journey from Syria to Iraq proposed an imaginary route to four cities laid waste by conflicts whose violence has over recent years turned them into theatres of war. Pictures of Damascus, Aleppo, Palmyra, and Mosul told their story, a fragmentary story, of this devastation. The landscape of ruins, in Marc Augé’s words, “cannot reproduce the past in its integrity; rather, it alludes intellectually to a multiplicity of ‘pasts’, somehow metonymically, it supplies our eye and our conscience with a dual proof of a lost functionality and an impressive actuality” (Marc Augé, 2003).

Lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922) and others from The Suspended Ode by Imru’ al-Qays (6^th century), invited the viewer to a moment of silence, stillness, and meditation, outside time. The exhibition layout was structured in three stages:

Stage one

Stage one displayed photographs by Iconem, a French start-up. Interspersed with literary quotations, these photographs revealed unusual views of the cities and invited the viewers to raise questions about the rubble, the ruins and the meaning of time. It is in the eye of the beholder that the fragments will come to life and take on meaning. The pictures showed piles of rubble: wreckage present of ruins past.

Stage two

In stage two, the documentary Mosul year zero by Roberto Antonini and Philippe Blanc beared testimony to what is left of Mosul, three years after the Isis Caliphate and one year’s fighting. The voices of witnesses are heard over the images, narrating their sad tales of loss and destruction. Besides the documentary, a number of freeze-frames represented crumbled landscapes of Mosul, as well as of Damascus, Aleppo, and Palmyra.

Stage three

Stage three consisted essentially in an immersive cam, the work of e-REAL Logosnet, whereby visitors were able to watch videos produced by Iconem and by Unesco. With extremely striking images, this all-absorbing experience engulfed the eye of the visitors, who found themselves suspended between past and present, here and there, destruction and reconstruction.