Proposal to Inhabit the Majnoon Field

The Majnoon oilfield in southern Iraq is one of the most extreme and compelling examples of manmade, planetary degradation. A wasteland littered with contaminants and unexploded ordinance from decades of war and militarism, Majnoon represents a pivotal, if unexpected, site of critical, gendered intervention – for it is cloaked in a perverse normalization of the international extraction industry, while depriving native geographies of ecological and societal in[ter]dependence. This area of research is therefore encircled by an overarching proposal: to inhabit the Majnoon Field, to emerge from the current planetary wreckage. Via this iteration, ‘Majnoon’ manifests as a platform for expanding research practices, occurring through multiple lenses of our abstract and physical realities. 

Methodological interests include deepening living relationships in the sense of an all-encompassing fieldwork, meanwhile decoding the tyranny of international profit-based policies; navigating inherited or manufactured meanings in order to dissolve and reinvent a language of collective desire; to inhabit this lot via uniquely and presciently queer/trans/feminist bodily orientations – by which to physically oppose and supplant, foremost, a racist global turpitude.

Rheim Alkadhi is an artist working in fields of continuous displacement. For many years, this practice has comprised a lived research, often originating in the variable terrains of West Asia, North Africa, and in spaces of dispersal across the planet. Preferred mediums include residues of concept and living interaction, text, photo, object, and environment.