Playified Narratives of the Memory of the Civil War in Raqqa

This thesis, entitled "Playified narratives of the Civil War Remembrance in Raqqa", aims to highlight the memory of the war through game, by designing a public park in the center of Raqqa in Syria. November 2018 is the starting point for the analysis of the situation, where the view of disaster dominated the city of Raqqa.
The main focus of our intervention is related to the collective memory and how it can be spatially captured. During the om-site survey, the strong presence of children playing among the ruins in the city, that has been observed, in combination with the audiovisual material collected, prompted the correlation of the memory with the game. Thinking of the game not merely as a mean of fun, but as a way of interaction, experience and discovery of the space characteristics, this particular endeavor attempts to spatially express memory not as a sight but as an active space where residents, both children and adults, will interact with it.
The site narrates the destruction of the city and the course of the inhabitants life in it. We attempt to build this empirical narrative a timeline of the key events that took place in Raqqa during the civil war. Thus the events and their spatial transposition create fragmented architectural images. A multiplicity pattern of pieces of the destroyed city is created, which take a playful use and are reused in the architectural intervention as a basic architectural vocabulary. The uses of the architectural forms referring to the images of war, have symbolic interpretations and in conjunction with different spatial variables, create an emotionally charged, but not too literal, environment.