Alia Farid, Palm Orchard

Narrator: Alia Farid lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. The work she made for the Biennial addresses the destruction of the ecology of south Iraq, the displacement of people, and the struggle for sovereignty. The daughter of two architects, Farid has an interest in the built environment and works in many different media, including film, sculpture, and installations.

Alia Farid: I’m interested in this idea of how nature or the things that had been sort of desecrated in the landscape reappear now in this kind of tokenistic form. The palm groves in Southern Iraq that were destroyed, how they reappear in the landscape, through these artificial trees. I’m also interested in how nature is seen as an accomplice to resistance in Southern Iraq. During Saddam Hussein’s regime, a lot of the Shiite rebels or people who were against Saddam Hussein’s rule, hid in the marshes. And that’s precisely why he sent orders to drain the marshlands.