LOK / 2018
From There’s No Such Thing As Fiction
Taught by Marijke Davey
Investigation into Destruction of Mosul
            The following images detail a six week investigation into the destruction of Mosul during the Battle of Mosul between ISIS and Iraqi and US Coalition Forces in 2016-2017. The process starts looking broadly at the city itself, the destruction and damage inflicted on the city and its people, identifying individual building programmatic losses of schools and cultural institutions. It then draws the lines of territory shrinking over time, matching this data with the destruction of buildings identifying correlations and anomalies.

The investigation then zooms in again, this time to the broad context of the University of Mosul. Here we see educational institutes form backdrops to war and even become munitions manufactures. We see this map the primary sources and new media such as twitter, facebook and youtube in space identifying damage and destruction within the campus and culpability for.


 


The project then zooms yet again to the central building of the campus, The University of Mosul Library, where an unparalleled loss of a million books, manuscripts and rare texts were lost during its destruction. Discussing with multiple ground sources it became apparent that both the US and Iraqi Coalition and ISIS has inflicted damge to the building. This saw investigations into various claims by both sources including identification of the use of Romeo Hellfire II delay fused missiles by US and Iraqi Coalition Forces. At the conclusion of the six weeks there were more questions left unanswered then at the start of the investigation. Testimonies had contradicted each other, timelines blurred. The concluding note was then to map the contradictions between reports and the ground sources I spoke to, laying bare how truth lies in multiplicity of perspectives and sources.