طرس – Palimpsest

Tterss is a mixed-media collage and video/LiDAR project that reimagines Baghdad as a layered site of physical presence and alternative possibilities. After a 40-year separation, I returned to my homeland. Using LiDAR technology to scan the urban landscape, I built an extensive repository of factual measurements, mapping the city’s neighborhoods, government edifices, shrines, iconic landmarks, and marshland peripheries. These scans also capture the silhouetted movements of people navigating daily life, a haunting reflection of how the strain of post-war realities resonates through the city’s failing infrastructure and the lives it struggles to sustain.

The LiDAR’s laser-precise data mappings are interwoven with photographs and archival materials (including vernacular imagery and architectural renderings), crafting compositions that explore the elasticity between imagining and depiction. The bricolage layers temporalities that trace the evolution of a city shaped by imperial interventions, shifting ambitions, and impossible desires. The project constructs a speculative space for understanding cities as microcosms of broader global crises, where modernization, conflict, and revival converge.

Acknowledgment
Elements from the Kamil and Rifat Chadirji Photographic Archive appear within my collages through the generous permission of the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT. I am grateful to engage with this extraordinary archive, whose visual record of Iraq’s architectural and cultural history continues to inspire and inform my work.

Graduate Research Assistant: Andrés Caballero