This article is my contribution to the collective publication for the art exhibition "Culture in defiance: Continuing Traditions of Satire, Art and the Struggle for Freedom in Syria" which just opened a week ago in Amsterdam at Prince Claus Foundation Gallery. Please note that this article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial license, you can download it and share but pls read the conditions below http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Hope to hear back from you on my blog www.mediaoriente.com or on twitter @donatelladr thanks!

1. P e e r - c r e at i v i t y a n d
The latest mash-ups, cartoons, slogans, jokes,
songs and web series reveal a new dynamic
between the ruler and the ruled.
T
71 o
10
w
a
r
d Written by Donatella Della Ratta
s
ac t i v e
c i t iz e n sh i p
in Syria
u s e r - g e n e r at e d co n t e n t s

2. as images of violence, civil war and sectarian strife ‘nationalism’, as if all the Syrian people’s demands
become prominent in the media narrative of the would be exactly the same, and would coincide
Syrian uprising, little gems of innovative cultural with those of the regime. in a way, the “i am with
production, artistic resistance and creative the law” campaign switching to a generic “i am
1
disobedience continue sprouting across the virtual with Syria” could have been a direct response to
alleys of the internet. these creative gems – mash- that “i am not indian”, which invited the advertiser
ups, cartoons, slogans, jokes, songs and web series – and the ruler – to reframe the issue in the
– are also the germs of a viral peer-production direction of a shared ‘Syrian’ common ground.
process at work at a grassroots level in the new
Syrian public sphere. from time to time they yet the new, more accommodating campaign,
manage to find their way out of the internet registered another new wave of user-generated
overfl ow and get noticed. responses over the internet, and not only in virtual
spaces. armed with a marker and most probably
beginning weeks after the fi rst demonstration hit at night-time, some citizens took the courage to
the centre of damascus on 15 march 2011, an descend from the virtual alleys of facebook to the
advertising poster, which started as a regime real streets of Syria. they deleted the second half
backed billboard campaign, took the unexpected of the slogan – “my demands are your demands”
shape of a viral peer-produced work that is still – and changed it into “my demands are freedom”.
being shared and re-manipulated by users after
more than a year since its creation. the outdoor in conferences or public talks , these witty
2
billboard campaign, clearly aiming at restoring examples of Syrian user-generated creativity
order in the streets and preventing people from usually elicit two different responses. the fi rst
protesting again, featured a raised hand declaring: praises this genre as the tangible signal that the
“Whether progressive or conservative, i am with ‘fear wall’ has been broken and Syrians are now
the law”; “Whether a girl or boy, i am with the law” able to express their opinions freely, hitting back
and similar slogans, all matched with multi- the regime’s message with multi-sided messages
coloured, raised hands. at some point, with these of their own. the second, while admiring the
3
coloured hands raised everywhere in public creativity behind this user-generated counter- 11
spaces, cities had a sort of orwellian atmosphere campaign, dismisses it as too small and insignificant
– ‘big brother’ was watching citizens and reminding to challenge the regime politically with only the
them to comply with the law. power of humour and satire. this second response
70
not only plays down the significance of user-
Soon after, parodies of these posters started generated creativity in political terms; it also
mushrooming in cyberspace. depicting the very deems it irrelevant to counterbalance industrially
same raised, coloured hands, each virtual poster produced form of arts and culture, like tv fi ction
carried a different slogan. “i am free,” said one (the well-known musalsalat – soap opera industry),
raised hand on a facebook group. “i lost my whose regime-tolerated contents and messages
shoes,” said another, echoing the suggestion of are able to reach out to a wider audience more
shoes being thrown at the dictator, a customary than any viral campaign on the internet.
way of protesting leadership in the arab world. “i
am not indian,” joked another poster, being the in reality, the boom of user-generated content in
ironic answer to a regime that has exclusive control the Syrian uprising does tell us that Syrians are
over the formal meaning of ‘law’ and ‘lawlessness’. reappropriating a creativity, which was long
“i am not indian” was reaffi rming the ‘Syrianness’ monopolised by the regime and elite-driven
of citizens who weren’t going to be fooled by a cultural production. cultural forms of dissent have
government that was treating them as if they were long been engineered or allowed by the regime,
foreigners in their own country. in what miriam cooke calls “commissioned
4
criticism”. the blossoming of this kind of peer-
at some point, the creative directors of the production on the internet reveals that Syrians
c a m p a ig n b e c a m e p ro b a b ly awa re of t h e enjoy a new relationship with creativity that is also
problematic usage of the word ‘law’ in Syria – and a new relationship with power and authority. this
of the ambiguous relationship between ruler and relationship now entails a feedback mechanism,
ruled that it entailed – and released new billboards. which is well illustrated by the ‘raised hands’
this time, the raised hand simply said: “i am with campaign, where the advertiser – and the ruler – is
Syria.” the colours used where those of the Syrian obliged to modify the original message as a result
national fl ag – red, white, black and green – and of the failure to communicate it or because of the
the slogan declared: “my demands are your miscommunication it had originated.
demands.” it was probably safer, from the regime’s
perspective, to try to win citizens’ hearts and on a strictly political level this might lead
m in d s by a p p e a lin g to a g e n e ric fo rm of nowhere, if the ruler is not willing to take into

3. the boom in Wedeen’s analysis, jokes, caricatures, fi lms, tv
serials, all these cultural resistance forms under
o f u s e r- g e n e r a t e d Hafez assad, are successful because of “the viewer
and the artists who have managed to speak to
co n t e n t
This paper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. Please read the conditions before republishing it http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
each other across the boundaries of censorial
i n t h e Sy r i a n prohibition and restraints”. on the contrary, user-
generated creativity sprouting from the Syrian
uprising does tell uprising is successful because it establishes a
dialogue between citizens, a non-mediated one.
u s t h a t Sy r i a n s a r e user-generated creativity does not need any
reappropriating a approval to go through censorship, and it is not
produced under the regime’s supervision nor
c r e at i v i t y, engineered by any top-down strategy. it simply
6
which was long blossoms at a grassroots level and creates room
for what yves Gonzales-Quijano calls “un dialogue
m o n o p o l i s e d by t h e citoyen” (‘a citizen dialogue’). as critic ahmed
ellabad puts it, when he describes the shock
regime and elite provoked to professional content creators by this
d r i ve n c u l t u r a l grassroots creativity: “revolution was the biggest
outdoor exhibition the world has ever known.
production. citizens competed to express their political ideas
in a way that, to my view, will never be repeated…
Some would create incredible slogans, others
consideration the ruled’s opinions and feedback. would paint their bodies but the most important
but on a social, cultural level, this reveals the kind thing is that all these propositions would fi nd
of culture emerging from the Syrian uprising, people to watch them, to react to them, to discuss
69
which the internet does not determine but helps with those who had created them.”
to frame and allows to emerge. therefore, the
fi rst job done by creative resistance and the new unlike cultural resistance under Hafez assad, user-
emerging user-generated creativity is to put into generated and peer-produced creativities are
bold relief the existence of this previously hidden effective not because they manage to bypass the
or underground Syrian ‘remix culture’ that censors and create a connection between citizens
12 lawrence lessig defines as the “read/write
culture” as opposed to the “read only culture”.
and artists. in the former case the connection
between the two functions through the content
5
of the artwork; it exists because of it, and does
the peer-produced raised hands going viral over not exist outside it. on the contrary, through user-
the internet and sometimes even in the Syrian generated creativity a direct dialogue between
streets do also another important job for Syrian citizens is established where content does not
society. mediate the relationships between them.
in her enlightening analysis of jokes, cartoons, films in this way, the distance between artists and
and everyday life practices of cultural resistance audiences fades away, being replaced by a unique
under Hafez al-assad’s rule, lisa Wedeen explains fi gure, ie the citizen who is able to create, even
how these live sites of political dissent work to through what clay Shirky defines as “the stupidest
undermine public rhetoric and the “disciplinary possible creative act”, namely a facebook page,
effects” of the leader’s cult. She underlines that, an internet meme, a viral cartoon. the ‘raised
while the latter “isolates and atomizes Syrian hands’ campaign shows the fl uency of Syrians in
citizenry by forcing people to evaluate each other offi cial rhetoric and their ability to challenge it
through the prisms of obligatory dissimulation, then and regain control over the world of symbols.
the comedies, cartoons, films and forbidden jokes
work to undo this mechanism of social control”. internet functions as the place where Syrians not
yet, it is precisely the act of recognising what only see their creative works featured; they see
Wedeen calls the “shared circumstances of unbelief” their connections displayed. it is the public venue
that makes the regime’s “politics of as if” stronger where citizens recognise themselves as creators
and its disciplinary effect more effective even and being capable to create. the ‘raised hands’,
through these artistic practices of dissent. in this still blossoming after more than one year of the
perspective, arts and culture – even those expressing uprising, signal the fact that people are not
dissent and defiance – become functional to connected through shared unbelief anymore; but,
perpetrate the regime’s symbolic power. rather, through a shared awareness of their ability
to create and recreate.
toWa r d S ac t i v e c i t i Z e n S H i p i n S y r i a