1771: Those Forgotten

Syrian protest in Newcastle reimagined by Sue Bowerman.

"As a radio documentary producer, I work mostly with authentic stories and I was initially drawn to this recording because of the subjectivity, Syria. What I didn’t know would happen was that I would find a piece of writing by a year 4 child who attends my son’s school (School21) (which I saw on his Mother’s Facebook page), in which he shares his personal insights into the Syrian war and how he would like to help.

The piece samples both the protest speech, which contests the US Air Strikes with excerpts from Panos Booth’s story, set to a hauntingly extraordinary piece of music featuring the Syrian vocalist, Dima Orsho. This ‘edited’ piece of music became the auditory backdrop for the reworking. Challenges were the ‘noise’ and foggy ‘auditory’ nature of the original protest recording and weaving in short excerpts from Panos’s writing to sympathetically enhance the original recording. Panos didn’t want to feature his voice, so he