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​Commissioned for Home Works 8 

Where Does A Thought Go When It's Forgotten? 2019

Sigmund Freud

Oil paint, color pencils, and ink drawings on
​envelopes, paper, and cardboard boxes

Production: Ashkal Alwan
Photography: Mohammed Abdallah

For the past ten years or so, a team of architects and illustrators has collaborated on reconstructing the kitchen and living room of a destroyed house on the outskirts of Baghdad. While producing floor plans and suggestions alongside the artist, and exchanging them via sealed envelopes, the team was overtaken by delightful scents. The plants and flowers from which those odors originated eventually found their way into the sealed envelopes and paperwork, as if haunting the architects and illustrators’ bodies in a ghostly matter. The latter found themselves drawing the poisonous flowers for two days in a row. A French architect even wrote: “The scent of this beautiful white flower has triggered nausea, thirst, and fever. Yesterday, we forgot where we were and caught ourselves witnessing things that do not exist.” The workflow was interrupted, and the output subsequently destroyed, considered to have been based on stolen ideas originally authored by the plants and flowers surrounding the team. ​