Backyard

In autumn 1998, near his home in the southwest of Damascus, Khaled Abdulwahed took a landscape photograph of a cactus field on a 35mm chrome film. Cacti grow all over the Middle East and are used as borders between houses and villages. Their thorny, tough plant is also a symbol of resilience. In the summer of 2012, the cactus fields were destroyed during the uprising, and the war started to form a new landscape. Khaled's picture on the film was damaged and lost, but he still had a scan of the photography-film.
The film deconstructs and reconstructs copies of the photograph of a Syrian cactus field projected on a wall in a flat in a Berlin backyard. Following the cactus field’s forceful deformation and the deformation of the cactus field’s picture, the battles between original and copy, reality and image, the author modifies, overwrites, and adapts his memory.