AlShare Media Foundation

2010 — Ongoing

Founded in Syria in 2010, AlShare was where Matar first worked across forms rather than inside a single medium: reporting, documentary film, public-space projects, training and collaborative media work.

Question and approach

AlShare began by documenting the social effects of drought and internal displacement before the uprising. From 2011 it produced reports and documentary films on protests, local organising, repression and daily life, while working with Arab and international media.

It then moved from documentation to creating public cultural space: the Syrian Street Festival, the Syria Mobile Film Festival, filmmaking training and production support. Between 2017 and 2019, the Raqqa Between Two Bridges programme worked with 24 civil-society organisations in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor and produced 407 short videos about their work.

The documentation of ISIS prisons also began inside AlShare in 2017. As that archive grew, it developed into the specialised and independent Prisons Museum institution.

Role in the work

FounderDirector

Matar founded AlShare as a working space rather than around one medium. His role moved between reporting, documentary production, public cultural work, training and later the first phase of prison documentation; many of the methods he uses now were tested there in less formal forms.

What took shape here

Reporting and documentary imageWorking inside Syria made access, proximity and the limits of the camera recurring methodological questions rather than only production problems.

Public spaceThe Syrian Street Festival treated screening, art and writing as ways of creating a temporary public space for testimony and disagreement.

Shared productionTraining and support programmes shifted part of the work from making images about others to creating conditions in which others could make and circulate their own.

From documentation to archiveThe ISIS prison work began inside AlShare and gradually required a different infrastructure: systematic site documentation, records, testimony, spatial reconstruction and a specialised archive.