As a result of a one-week workshop, Saskia de Vries, Floor Wandel and I created the interactive installation Route. Route is based on, and an addition to, the NFF project ‘Notes from Aleppo’.
Inspired by social alienation as a result of our habit of generalizing other human beings, we wanted to encourage human empathy by means of telling a simple and personal story. Storytelling can make it easier to identify with seemingly different people. We chose someone’s route to work to be that simple story.
In the installation, you are seated between two different routes. One route belongs to a Dutch male and the other to a Syrian male. Both describe their daily routines of traveling to work in their native language. The participant is positioned between two screens that show the visual travels of the roads described. It is as if you were looking out of a car window, except that both sides of the road are, both literally and figuratively, completely different.