Al Fadhil:
Home Sweet Home, video, 2006.
Home Sweet Home
A video project by Al Fadhil
During the summer of 2005, Al Fadhil, who is based in Europe, asked his brother Ahmed to take pictures of their parents’ place in Iraq to document the condition of the people through the habitat of their house.
With this project, the artist continues an engagement with Iraq begun in 2003 with the performance I am the Iraq Pavilion at the 50thVenice Biennale.
The idea of Talking with Ahmed developed from an intensive, internet-based correspondence between the artist and his brother. Ahmed was to be present at the opening to Talking with Ahmed at Cantonale Lugano Museum in Switzerland in May as direct witness of the facts, but fate was hiding a tragic surprise: on March 27 th, 2006, he was killed in an attack in Baghdad.
The idea of speaking of the existence of people through the medium of their habitat is coherent when speaking of the situation of a family like ours; all the humours of life are fused and reflected in the lives of its members. It takes some time to understand the sense of our way of life: why we have accepted an abode like this, why we have accepted such degradation. Look at the colour of the earth, the bricks, the stones. They seem imbued with suffering, united in a form without identity, but which is at least protective. Let us not cower inside this stronghold of illusion. Let us continue to hope.
In this cruel time, there is not a family in the country that has not lost a son, as has ours, in one of these never-ending wars. In recompense, the dictator gave us some land on which the family built a big house to honour the son's sacrifice. But conditions worsened and in order to combat the problem of growing poverty, the family had to sell the house and buy another one: the one you see, empty and inhospitable.
With our bundles of belongings, fragments shored against our ruin, we have arrived at the epilogue of our existence. The house is a mirror image of our state: afflicted, disoriented, but alive. Is it still possible to dream knowing that everything has finished in a thousand pieces? Look at our possessions, useful only as witness to the ferocious passage of people and events: they have rendered the earth arid, and to remind ourselves that we once had a garden, we decorate our daily lives with flowers - plastic flowers. Our electrical appliances bear witness too, mute spectators in this sorry place, waiting for a spark, a glimmer of light.
We bear the scars carved into our memory, alongside the inanimate objects, without relief. And when a man comes to resemble the objects he possesses, he ceases to exist.
Look well, dear brother, at these spectral beds in a room separated from us by a distance overflowing with solitude; here our parents lay themselves down to rest.
Our mother, resigned, clutches a portrait of her favourite son, now a long way from home. She hopes for his return, perhaps so she may die in peace.
Our father, who has survived everything, believes in nothing any more, only in his Imam, the redeemer who will come one day to bring some justice and, who knows, maybe some order to this mayhem.
I have always asked myself what the point of having a home is, if this is the result. Believe me, looking in depth into this existence breaks my heart!
Ours is a waiting, a waiting without end.
Al Fadhil is an Iraqi artist who lives and works between Milan, Berlin and Paris