Baladi - Coverage
When Mohammed Kteish was 13, he would walk on to his rooftop in Aleppo each day to spot which buildings had been destroyed. Using paper and glue, he made models of what he could no longer see, incorporating bits of debris he found – spent bullet casings, bomb shells – to recreate the city where he had grown up.
In early 2015 Mohammed’s neighbour, an award-winning journalist called Waad al-Kateab, put him in touch with a UK-based film-maker, Alex Pearson. The film-maker helped the family escape Syria via the well-trodden refugee trail to south-east Turkey, and organised an exhibition for Mohammed’s project – which had been abandoned in the family garage as the situation in Aleppo deteriorated. With initial funding from Pearson, the models – and elements of other cities – were then recreated in a virtual reality (VR) film, Future Aleppo.
“In the future, I want to be an architect,” says Mohammed, who is now 16 and living in Turkey with his family. “This project has been the beginning of fulfilling those dreams.” The latest version of Future Aleppo is a combination of augmented reality and VR: users walk through Mohammed’s paper city wearing a headset, which allows them to interact with it virtually as well as physically.
They can throw a virtual paper plane; wherever it lands, new buildings blossom like origami. Conductive ink, incorporated with the help of Mohammed’s electrician father, helps embed sounds from their family in the models: the city becomes a vessel for the stories of those who lived there.
Funding for Future Aleppo has been sporadic. Recent support from the Opec Fund for International Development enabled Pearson and Mohammed to take the exhibition to a camp in Kahramanmaras, Turkey, where Google Cardboard headsets – allowing ordinary smartphones to be transformed into VR devices – have become a valuable commodity. Mohammed now hopes to secure a special visa to visit Vienna, where Future Aleppo will be part of a VR exhibition.
Source: NewStatesman