Monographie basée sur un projet multisupport qui prend pour origine le champ pétrolifère de Majnoon, dans le sud de l'Irak.
Majnoon is an oil field in the global south. Majnoon is also the violence, and the state of mind that survives the violence. How can this be a field guide in any customary sense? Latitudes have been taken. Words are written in disruptedor troubled syntax. Rather, this book proceeds alongsidea search for what many call emancipatory practice; to beenacted in the field, where we feel most alive. The volume is divided into five parts, preceded by mapsand legends.First in the sequence is a colour-coded soil map,"Majnoonand Hir Environs", adapted from materialoriginally published in 1960 by the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture. It wasthe product—relic, really—of a brief era that saw fieldsand farmlands redistributed among labourers and peasants.Since then, the map has changed with the shifting sub-stance of our earthly constitution; it pivots on the exampleof Majnoon. Any map is appended by its legends, and I rewrite themfrom the perspective of dismantling. A longish colour keyunfolds with the likeness of a poem pursuing return, inspite of scorch and ruin. It should be mentioned that 'hir'recurs multiple times throughout the book as gender-nonconforming pronoun—suggestive, ambiguous, and, inmy opinion, sufficiently sound for the moment. It is essentialto keep needling the problem of language.
A second, simpler map charts water flow as casualty ofupstream accumulation. Dams are borders, after all, and weare lousy with them; downstream is sentenced to the whimsof an architecture whose gates are mostly closed. On themap, a symbol resemblinga small, numbered page locatesMajnoon as point of interest. A subsequent diagram alsocontains this motif—not for navigation through the field,butthrough the book itself.<
Rheim Alkadhi (née en 1973 à New York, vit et travaille à Berline après avoir vécu en Irak et aux États-Unis) est une artiste interdisciplinaire dont le travail ouvre des perspectives variées sur les frontières, la migration, le genre et l'intimité d'une manière poétique, et incite à remettre en question les habitudes visuelles.
