طرس – Tterss (Palimpsest)

The project turns to the mid-twentieth century as a formative moment in Iraq’s political and geopolitical ascent, when architecture, planning, and civic life carried aspirations for modernity. Drawing on photographs made by the artist in Baghdad alongside family photographs, vernacular imagery, ephemera, and architectural archives connected to the Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji, Alshaibi constructs layered compositions that move between document and speculation.

The collages treat Baghdad as a palimpsest: a city marked by overlapping histories, interrupted futures, and competing visual regimes. LiDAR scans appear within these composites as spatial traces, fracturing and complicating the archival and photographic field. Rather than functioning as neutral technological records, the scans register the instability of seeing a place shaped by both intimate memory and historical violence.

In counterpoint, the video work Roadwork is composed of contemporary footage and LiDAR scans captured by Alshaibi in Baghdad, following the movements of daily navigation through the city. The video brings the project into the present tense, where damaged infrastructure, ordinary circulation, and the pressures of lived reality register as measures of endurance and strain.

Tterss positions Baghdad as more than a city defined by aftermath. It becomes a lens onto the ambitions and contradictions of modernity itself, where political desire, built form, exile, and historical memory remain deeply entangled.

Acknowledgment
With gratitude to the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT for permission to use elements from the Kamil and Rifat Chadirji Photographic Archive.

Tterss, 2025–2026
24 mixed-media collages

Roadwork (excerpt), 2025
Video and LiDAR with sound, 8 min. 17 sec.

Artist/editor/sound: Sama Alshaibi
Roadwork LiDAR data visualization: Sama Alshaibi, Devin Bayly, Karina Buzzi, Ben Kruse, Andrés Caballero
Roadwork field assistants in Iraq: Shawk Ayman and Abdulrahman Zeyad
Tterss graduate research assistant in the USA: Andrés Caballero