2024-12-08 21:12:27
Soph Dyer
A hotel, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
The Netherlands
NOAA-19
I lean out of the hotel window to catch a noisy signal. The signal and noise come in waves: signal rising, noise rising, signal rising, rising, rising, rising. "Assad’s gone." "I told you," my closest Syrian friend writes from Hong Kong. "How are you celebrating?" I ask. He sends a photo of him looking sharp, wearing a Mercedes cap, with a keffiyeh draped over his shoulders, holding a slice of red velvet cake.
"U have no idea how ecstatic I am," he writes.
No one I know believed that this day would come. And, at what cost? "I'd written off a future without Assad," WhatApps a former human rights colleague who, in 2016 interviewed survivors of Saydnaya Prison. I recall her saying that the investigation had almost folded as they could not find enough interviewees because so few people left the prison alive.
I watch on Al Jazeera as a stream of men and women walk up a dirt path between mine fields, into the open gates of Saydnaya.
2024-06-14 11:36:59
Soph Dyer, Nicola Locatelli
Stefy & C. Market Di Gallizia S. e Valent S. Snc, Moggio di Sotto, Italy
Italy
NOAA-18
I cannot focus on the meteorological weather as a delivery truck arrives to unload at the supermarket, which carefully crop out of shot. In the moment irritated the moment, but later accept my foolishness of my desire to document the mountains without people, cars and the heavy industry that lines the Fiume Fella river valley.