Edouard Elias : Syria Year 0

On the road linking Homs to Hama, a monumental statue of Hafez al-Assad, erected in the late 1990s, was toppled by Syrian rebels during their advance southwards in December 2024.
© Edouard Elias

From October 6 to November 9

Edouard Elias : Syria Year 0

After more than ten years of war, Syria enters 2025 in a period of uncertain transition. Bashar al-Assad’s regime has collapsed, leaving behind a country in ruins: more than 580,000 dead, 100,000 missing and 13 million displaced or refugees. The regime waged a total war against its own people, relying on a sprawling security apparatus: mass arrests, systematic torture, enforced disappearances, and aerial bombardments of civilian areas. Entire neighbourhoods in cities such as Aleppo, Homs, Deraa and Yarmouk were razed to the ground by artillery and air strikes. Detention centres (Saïdnaya, Tadmor, Mezzeh) and the various branches of the intelligence services have been the instruments of a regime based on fear, silence and erasure. At the same time, Islamic State has imposed another form of terror on certain regions, based on spectacular violence, public executions and the destruction of heritage. In Palmyra, ancient temples and the columns of the Roman theatre were blown up in an attempt to erase all traces of memory that did not conform to their ideology. These two systems, in different forms, imposed silence through repression, fear, disappearance or destruction. This black-and-white documentary work traces the traces of this silence in the landscapes that still stand: abandoned prisons, empty cells, ruined neighbourhoods, deserted streets. Through these remnants, the image of a collapsed world emerges, where we move seamlessly from the ruins of antiquity to those of the present. What emerges is not only the history of a war, but that of the brutal disappearance of a civilisation caught between two forms of totalitarianism.

—

Outside in Bayeux

This exhibition was created in association with Nikon