from the toppling of a dictatorship

Saidnaya Prison, constructed in 1981, served as one of the most notorious detention and torture centers of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad’s regimes. This rubble, which had dropped from the central panopticon of the prison, symbolizes the fall of the old regime and the liberation of the prison’s political prisoners. Parts of the prison floor have been torn up in search of secret spaces. Many disappeared detainees have yet to be found.

Nicolas Niarchos in Damascus