The Syrian revolution witnessed an unprecedented outpouring of cultural expressions. Since the protests erupted across the country in 2011, citizens from all walks of life employed art, satire and creative writing to stand against the regime. These protests did not initially call for the downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but for greater freedoms and dignity, and remained relatively peaceful until December 2011, when rebel groups began forming under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army in response to violence by the state security forces. As the voices of ordinary Syrians have been lost amid the violent clashes that have dominated the past six years, how will the creative spirit of the revolution be remembered in the coming years?

Syrian graphic designer Sana Yazigi wanted to make sure that these peaceful voices and creative works are not forgotten. After fleeing her hometown of Damascus and settling in Beirut, she created a simple Wordpress site to publish some of them. Her aim was to document how Syrians spoke out and asked for their rights after 50 years of government-imposed silence.

Today, the trilingual website, called “The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution,” boasts some 23,000 documents available in Arabic, French and English. This project and a related book, “The Story of a Place, the Story of a People,” are sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation, the Swiss and Norwegian embassies, and the CCFD-Terre Solidaire, in a special partnership with TANDEM and Scene Nationale. The projects aim to “shed light on the pacific civil movement and the just cause of the Syrian people, which has always been neglected by the media,” explains the introduction of the book.

Yazigi and her 25-person team of artists, language specialists and geographers collected various forms of Syrian expression on the web and researched their context — graffiti, murals, drawings, sculptures, videos, photos, poems, songs, caricatures, texts — beginning around 2011 and classified them according to their dates and places of creation. The findings also inspired the book “The Story of a Place, The Story of a People,” which started as a sub-project under the website.