Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

In recent years, the Middle East has experienced the birth of a historical socio-political movement: ‘confederal democracy’. This concept postulated by Abdullah Öcalan, led to the creation of a ´de facto´ autonomous Kurdish region located in the northeast of Syria: Rojava; experience analogous to the one in Iraqi Kurdistan: the Kurdistan Regional Government.

This research focuses on a field study conducted by the author, on the area, during winter of 2019 and 2020, at a time when United States stopped widespread military support to their Syrian Kurdish allies in the fight against Daesh.

Such withdrawal of military resources brought along: ‘Operation Spring of Peace’; a military operation carried out by the Turkish Armed Forces and their jihadi proxies: The Free Syrian Army; in order to contain terrorist threats in the region. Such offensive generated a new migration wave between the northeast of Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan.

With the support of assets and multimedia materials collected on the ground, the author builds a first-person point of view narrative and immersion into the Kurdish diaspora, where the player is faced, with the post-traumatic experience of being a victim of war and of geographical dispersion.