Building a House of Memory: Expanding Iraqi Archive Photos with Storytelling and VR

Basil Al-Rawi presents “Building a House of Memory: Expanding Iraqi Archive Photos with Storytelling and VR” at the panel “The Archive as Imperative: Approaches in the History of Art and Architecture in the Middle East and North Africa”. The panel is organized by Manazir as part of the 6th Swiss Congress on Art History & the 50th Anniversary of the ASHHA.

Al-Rawi’s work presents a case study of his practice-based PhD research (Glasgow School of Art, 2019–2023), which interrogates how vernacular photography and participatory practice can remediate Iraqi cultural memory beyond institutional frameworks through immersive technology. In response to the fragmented and often inaccessible state of archives in the MENA region, the project develops a counter-archival methodology that repositions everyday Iraqi photographs and oral histories as living, collective memoryscapes.

The project unfolds across three interrelated strands. First, the Iraq Photo Archive (2020–ongoing) is a crowd-sourced, open-access repository of vernacular Iraqi photographs (pre-1990), each submitted with contextual descriptions that reground the images in memory rather than detached circulation. Participatory oral histories with archive contributors employs photo elicitation to draw out affective and sensory details, producing situated narratives that foreground the potency of personal memory. Finally, House of Memory / الــــذاكــــرة بــــيت, a Virtual- Reality environment modelled on a traditional Baghdadi shanasheel house, spatialises these photographs and testimonies into immersive atmospheres of recollection where voice, image, and environment converge.

Basil Al-Rawi is an artist and Assistant Professor in Digital Communication and Media Production at the University of Doha for Science and Technology. His personal website can be reached here.