Ruination in Wounded Baghdad: Visualizing and Problematizing the Spatialization of Destruction

Considering Baghdadi urbanity today translates into contending with spatial destruction and what that leaves behind as far as the spirit of the wounded city. Going beyond the mere physical, pain that is exacted onto space is imprinted upon the psyche of streets and alleyways so much so that the relationship becomes a perplexing one. Place and people alike are beckoned into attempting to reckon and engage with the wound. It has become part of the spatial fabric and so must be looked at as such. History and historiography have additionally illustrated topological ruin that had been visited upon the capital since its founding. Journeying through the recent past and present requires addressing this accumulated spatial confusion. It means taking in the place-based nuances that are as psychogeographical as they are arbitrary. Iraqi creatives have done this repeatedly by rendering the hurt and settling it into their outputs. The problematization of space in this sense is an opportunity to, as the city fell into a new pattern of being, migrate the politics of the situation into a poetics. Disastrous violence essentially fashions a different character. It is only in this way that the cycle of devastation may physically cease to arrest and interrupt existence when it is allowed into the fold of the spatial everyday. It is then that urban life may find a new tone and tenor not merely surviving but allowing woundedness to have potentiality.