Can T-Wall Murals Really Beautify the Fragmented Baghdad?
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17704/can-t-wall-murals-really-beautify-the-fragmented-b
Since April 2007, Baghdad has been experiencing a walling strategy designed by the US-led Multi-National Forces (MNF) occupying Iraq then. Between 2005 and 2008, kidnappings, assassinations and population displacements became the main tactics used by the Sunni insurgency and Shiite militias in their struggle to delimit newly homogenized areas over which they could gain spatial control and power. The MNF justified their strategy of surrounding some neighborhoods with concrete blast walls (also known as “T-walls”) as a way of protecting city residents from the urban violence severely affecting daily life in Baghdad. By preventing hostile groups from penetrating neighborhoods, kidnapping people or using car-bombs and suicide-bombers, these security walls brought a limited and temporary solution to the effects of the sectarian violence, but did not address its causes. With time, they progressively became the physical manifestations of a spatial reordering of the city along the same ethnic/sectarian and politicized dividing lines that have transformed Baghdadi society (see Damluji 2010, musingsoniraq, and Iraq green). In 2008, the US army, the Iraqi government, and some foreign associations commissioned a 100,000 dollars budget beautification campaign to subsidize murals on the recently built T-walls, as to mask the “ugliness” of the barriers. This resulted in the creation of a whole series of paintings all over Baghdad, led by the local municipalities.
#Irak #Bagdad #art
