House of Memory / بيت الذاكرة developed from Basil Al-Rawi's practice-based PhD research at the Glasgow School of Art. This VR experience derives from photographs and narratives contributed by Iraqi diaspora globally to the Iraq Photo Archive (www.iraqphotoarchive.com). This crowd-sourced collection invites participants to describe photos from their personal collections and take part in a filmed conversation about their memory of a photographic moment. They recollect visual and aural details from the moment of the photograph, as well as emotive reflections on their past, present and future lives. The recorded conversations, together with the original photograph, are remediated into a digitally constructed environment, where viewers can enter an expanded interactive photographic moment in Virtual Reality, and experience an encounter with an individual’s story from Iraq’s past.

A 3D reconstruction of a traditional Iraqi ‘Shanasheel’ house is the central virtual
environment through which the remediated memories are experienced. When you interact with a photograph in the virtual space, you are transported into a spatial reconstruction of the photographic moment, and hear the memories of a person in the image. The digital materiality of a game environment presents a space constructed from the memories and narratives of Iraqi participants, and counters the dominant use of this medium to gamify Iraqi trauma. The ongoing project is concerned with building collective community histories and counter narratives, forming wider understanding of Iraqi stories beyond one-dimensional media representations, and challenging the dominant representation of Iraqi environments and culture within entertainment media such as video games.

Basil Al-Rawi is an Irish-Iraqi multidisciplinary artist working with photography, film, sculpture, and immersive technologies. His practice is concerned with the landscapes of memory, identity, politics, and mediated reality. Remediation, reconstruction, intervention, and participation are central to his process, and he’s interested in recomposing archival material to form virtual bonds with the past and create expanded photographic moments.

In 2023 he completed a practice-based PhD at The Glasgow School of Art, where he utilised participatory methods to explore the creative reconstruction of photographic moments and associated memories from Iraqi diaspora in VR. Basil has exhibited in group shows at IMMA, Rua Red, The Photographers Gallery, and the Institute of International Visual Arts, amongst others. His practice is currently supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Cork County Council.