In this article, I return to Baghdad in search of a fabled city only to find an ungraspable multitude of mishappenings. A theatre for contesting images, the city streets are victim to haphazard renewal and out-of-sync monumentalization, the latter being a sacralised material manifestation of secular and religious ideologies whose maintenance, like the homogenous society they are intended to fabricate, necessitates appropriating or excising what is deemed as profane. Spatially and materially made abject, in its uncanny suspension the supposed profane is limbo-ed, obscured and threatened with erasure. My walks across town investigate this tension, as I meditate on alternative initiatives at memorialization and monumentalization undertaken by those left behind.
Nabil Salih (Mon,) studied this question.