Syrian Artist Mohamad Hafez on Art, Exile and the Fall of Assad

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And next to another creator taking inspiration from their home country, this time Syria. Architect Mohamad Hafez creates replicas of Damascus, capturing the beauty and the spirit of the city in intricate 3D models. Living in the United States since 2003, he’s had to channel his homesickness and his anguish over Syria’s devastating civil war into this work. Now, with Bashar Assad gone, Michel Martin asked Hafez about his hopes for this moment and how odd has helped him cope.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Mohamad Hafez, thank you so much for speaking with us.

MOHAMAD HAFEZ, SYRIAN-AMERICAN ARTIST AND ARCHITECT: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: So, you were born in Syria. You spent some time out of the country. You’ve been in the States for a number of years. And so, obviously, I want to talk about your beautiful work. But before we do, the events of the last couple of days have been so momentous, so overwhelming, things have happened so quickly. Can I just ask how you’ve been experiencing all of this?

HAFEZ: I’m not sure I have a straight answer of how I am experiencing all of this or any of my family members. It has been indoctrinated for my entire life in my head to think a certain way, and now, all of a sudden, everything is up for grabs. So, I’m happy from the inside. I’m very, very happy. I’m very optimistic, but we’re also very cautious of what is to come. And we’re a bit concerned with the security of the country and the looting and everything that we started seeing. So, it’s a bit concerning. But overall joyous, overall optimistic, overall driven, scared, feeling a rush of love for all students. Feeling a huge amount of gratefulness that I have been lucky enough to witness this time out.

MARTIN: So, let me go back. You were born in Damascus. I understand that you grew up some years in Saudi Arabia, then went back to Syria when you were, what, a teenager, around 15. And is that when you really started to kind of see the city?

HAFEZ: Absolutely. Growing up in Saudi Arabia was a great childhood because we kind of grew up in a bubble, in a compound for physician families. My dad was a physician there. We left when I was a teenager trying to find my roots in 1999. And I went from a private, very upscale academy, to the Syrian regime high school system where I myself wore the military uniform and was shoved with five people on a plank of wood they called the desk and with 50 people total in the classroom and with people – – teachers yelling and spewing out rhetoric, but also going out to the streets of Damascus right after that and walking the streets and seeing mosques right next to churches, right next to synagogues, right next to nude sculptures, right next to a Muslim hijabi woman with niqab and then moving to a much — a different aesthetic. And I’m seeing what is this place and what is this view of code, systems. And the churches would go up, bells, and call to Azan (ph) and the merchants in the street. So, I immediately got infatuated with that and I said, OK, that’s my roots. This is where I’m from. And it’s changed my entire life. So, I wasn’t the teenager that was interested in sports or kicking ball or anything. I was a teenager with my sketchbook in the streets of old Damascus, just taking it all in.

MARTIN: Is that where you fell in love with architecture? It’s just the idea of the physical place and what it means and how much it carries?

HAFEZ: Absolutely. Architecture is a way to tell stories. It’s an open book that you walk through. It’s the footprint of civilizations in the physical realm.

MARTIN: I mean, it really is a cradle of civilization. It really is a place that contains the centuries, you know, within it.

HAFEZ: Absolutely. I mean, doors tell your stories. Doors — and there are doorknobs in Syria that are older than some countries around the world.

MARTIN: So, in 2003, you moved to the U.S. to study architecture, but at some point, you realize that you have a single entry visa. Do you remember what it was like to take in that realization?

HAFEZ: Of course, I remember. I will never forget that day. A friend of mine had pointed out the many entries allowed on the visa. I thought I had a student visa. I must be allowed to come and go. And he said, check, how many. Is it going to have an S or M? S for single, M for multiple. I’m sure as heck I ran to my passport and I opened it and it said single entry only. I said, what does that mean? He said, you’re going to have to go back home and apply all over again for the same visa and wait all over again. You have to realize. We’re a Syrian family that sent people to study in the United States since 1985. My security background check took a year and a half in Damascus. None of that mattered. All that mattered that this guy is a Muslim, Mohamad (ph), Syrian, who was in Saudi Arabia. It was Bush era. It was post-9/11.

MARTIN: Post-9/11.

HAFEZ: He must be SSS on the passport. So, I continuous — I can immediately learned I’m not messing with these people. I’m not going home. And sure as heck the floor — the travel ban, as we know it today, existed back then, but nobody knew about it. But it forced us, those students, young students, to register with the FBI every time they left the city. Every time we planned to go from Iowa to Chicago to visit.

MARTIN: But then 2011 is when the mass protest started and then the Civil War — as we know it now, the Civil War started. And then, again, you realize that you can’t go back. Do you remember what that felt like?

HAFEZ: Absolutely. I was a young architect. I was fortunate enough and I owe them this to work with an amazing group of architects and my boss, John Picard (ph), who entrusted me as a young architect and gave me so much trust to lead huge projects at a very young age. And all of a sudden, he says, you’re going to pitch a project for us in Beirut. And I said, thank you, but you have to understand something about me. My visa is a single entry. You send me to Beirut, I have to go to Damascus to stamp my visa at the embassy and I don’t know how long it would take to run my security background check. It takes years. I think my bosses did not even realize what was going on. He just, Mohamad, we have lawyers, just go, go. So, we go and we pitch the project in Beirut, and I go to Damascus as an aftermath to go stamp my visa in Beirut, and that was May 2011. Daraa had started. We start, we looked at it and I even was part of a protest that erupted in the — on a Friday when we — when I prayed Friday prayer in Damascus. I was living that. I was so joyous. I was so homesick that I was walking in the streets of Damascus, recording people talking, recording the calls to prayers in secret. And people are like, what is wrong with you? I wanted to soak it in. I realized I had a nasty feeling inside this, that this is a gift from God, Muhammad. Take it all in. You’re not seeing this ever again. I really had this feeling inside me that this is your last time. And these are the recordings that later on I found by chance, remembered that I had them and I started infusing them in my artwork. And so, when you’re inside the miniature, you’ll hear all of the sudden the call to prayer and the kids running around and the merchants. What I realized then is I had captured a moment of peace that was no longer existing when these artworks came out to the world.

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MARTIN: How did the artwork start? How did the artwork begin? Because I said you’re an architect. You’re in charge of, you know, huge, you know, multimillion dollar projects. So, how did the artwork start?

HAFEZ: It started my first year in college, when they told me you’re never seeing their family again, you’re never seeing the Damascus again. And I was so homesick. So — and this was 2003. This was well before — this was the golden new era of Damascus, where we’re opening up to the world, modernity, cell phone, internet, my family is gathering, without me, all four — three siblings and my two parents, weddings, my — and birth of my nephews and nieces and all of these, and I’m so homesick. And I said, stop whining. If you can’t go to Damascus, make Damascus. And as an architect student with tools of model making tools, I started putting a couple of things together and, you know, I remember my first piece, I just started tinkering around and I looked at the clock and later on was like, oh, I just spent 10 straight hours on this, but it felt good. It felt — it feels — and so, I started in secret doing these things alongside my studying, my career and so on. And so, by dumb luck, over the last 24 years I’ve been in America, my artwork evolved in stages that reflected literally what was happening in the ground and what I was feeling. So, I went from a nostalgic — my earlier work are very pristine, nostalgic reproductions of old Damascus to the invasion of Iraq, what we saw to (INAUDIBLE) and all the way fast forward to Syrian uprising, the Arab Spring, all of that, I have artwork that resembled this, that was built in secret.

MARTIN: What did you think it was? How did — what did — what is it to you?

HAFEZ: We know — we now call it art therapy or cathartic or expression. But I knew because you’ve got to realize, you know, on the daytime, I was a clean-shaven Italian looking Mauricio architect that’s trying to pull a corporate, you know, composed look pitching $200 and $300 million. But the Mohamad that went back home every day and opening his feed to destruction and cities as old as Damascus and Aleppo be bombed out of existence after all the love relationship that I had gone through with my home country. And I’m seeing all of that heritage being blown out of existence. You can imagine the hot and cold cycles that I went through daily.

MARTIN: So, how did it start that your art became recognized as art? I mean, at first, it was — forgive me, it was therapy. It was a way to just express all that was inside of you. When did you realize that it was art? And when did it become recognized by other people as art?

HAFEZ: In this very studio, I would spend endless, endless nights building these things and building. And every few — you know, every blue moon, I would allow somebody to this little bubble. And it got to a point where I think it was 2015 or 2016 when somebody went into my studio and said, this is — people need to see this. I’m like no, no, they really — this is just for me. He was like, you’re crazy. You’re — this needs to be seen. I don’t recall how things have happened, but I — the things that happened so fast that in less than a year, I was written up in The New York Times, New Yorker, Guardian, Global Citizen. I was very quickly doing about six solo exhibits. You have to understand that when I came out to the world, I had a body of work of 24 years that resembled all of these eras. And it was the refugee crisis over then. And people wanted to understand a lot about Syria and refugees in ways that the politicians were not able to humanize and talk about it. And so, that’s — and then a documentary came out and that’s all — it all happened so fast and I couldn’t care less about the lies that was. I mean, appreciative, but for the exposure, but I couldn’t care less about it. I was just — it was for me. I had food on the table. I was an architect. It was for me. But the more I would put the work out there, the more — many peoples all over the world from many walks of life, not Middle Easterns, not Syrians, Europeans, Germans, Jewish people, would flock to my exhibits and relate and resonate with this anguish and homesickness and pain.

MARTIN: Your family is still all over, is it right? Your family is still separated like all over the world. I mean, you have siblings who live in one place. You live in the United States.

HAFEZ: Yes.

MARTIN: Can you try to explain for people who have not had that experience of what it’s like to be separated from family and not see them for years, not be able to? Can you describe that?

HAFEZ: Now, we’re in December. We just passed Thanksgiving holiday. I hated Thanksgiving holiday in every inch of my body. Everybody around me in college and in my, you know, 25 years in America were just like you’re saying, subconsciously preparing to be with families around these dinner tables. I was that kid that would sit at home without anywhere to go, homesick, watching my family’s life, death, close people to me getting married and so on and without being able to take part of these simple human activities that nourish us as humans in a relationship. And it’s a simple light to every human around the world. What crime did I commit to be — to have that stolen from me, to have these minutes of joy and sorrow and sadness stolen from me? So, for many — I couldn’t even — I didn’t want to talk about it, but I made art to make sure to talk about the pain of homesickness. And sometimes the whole piece that I’m making is just my mom’s salon and my mom’s sofa inside a suitcase.

MARTIN: Each phase of the experience has manifested itself in your work, and I can’t wait to see what this phase inspires in you. Do you think you might go back to Syria at some point?

HAFEZ: I think two nights ago, I just couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep. I tried attempting and I finally woke up in the middle of the night and I said, I have to do this. I decided to give away all my artwork that was built in that era to proper institutions and museums, to highlight that black era, that dark era that we have went through and to remind us of the Syria never again moment. This is an end of an era, no matter how troublesome, no matter how pessimistic, optimistic people are, there is nothing worse coming or worth fearing than what we’ve seen as Syrian people under that regime. The whole world can agree that this is an era that will never come back. We can go through turmoil to rebuild and stand on our feet, absolutely, it’s understandable, but we have as collective artists to say this has finished. One, to teach ourselves to dream. I need to put a line in the sand to say now, Mohamad, you can’t go back. What you going to do about it? So, the work that I have been doing with immigrant and refugee kids here to — in the diaspora now has a new other dimension where I’m saying, your work has to go into institutions, to educate what had happened, grow on it, learn the mistakes and build the society together. I have — I’m very eager and curious recent in the last two nights. I’m saying — I’m thinking to myself. How did the Germans do it? How did they reconcile? How did they come together? How did many nations that went through this come together and forgive and forget while learning? So, with that initiative, I hope many artists, creatives of Syrian will come together and put that line in the sand say, listen, right now is a dark moment. We understand. But time will come where we will have our own institutions and it’s time to rebuild the new generation.

MARTIN: Mohamad Hafez, it’s been a delight. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

HAFEZ: Thank you. I appreciate it. God bless.