Medina Wasl: Connecting Town
16mm film transferred to video, 2018, color, sound, 31 min
Artist:Â Gelare Khoshgozaran
As a film project, Medina Wasl: Connecting Town glances at the history of orientalist traditions, landscapes and imagination, as it has developed and persisted over time in the California Mojave desert, and as the lineage of todayâs militarization of the Middle East. The introduction of date palm to the US around 1902, led to the Indio Date Festivals of the 1940s-1980sâa tradition continued today as âThe Riverside County Fair and Date Festivalâ with Sahara Trails, Caravansaries, Camel and Ostrich Races, and Arabian Night Pageants. Only a short drive from Indio are several simulacra of Middle Eastern towns at U.S. military training centers. Through the lens of Saidâs Orientalism, the project studies the role and history of fiction and speculation in the constructs of the Middle East, and the continued violence enacted through conflating languages, landscapes, cultures and geographical territories in relation to the War on Terror. Medina Wasl: Connecting Town was shot in the small towns of Mecca and Thermal, CA, as well as US the Fort Irwin National Military Training Center or âThe Box.â Also known as âLittle Afghanistanâ or âMedina Wasl,â The Box houses multiple Middle Eastern combat towns, providing simulated battlefields in a climate resembling that of Iraqâs. Originally build during the invasion of Afghanistan, âMedina Waslâ is a âMiddle Easternâ town donning the Afghan flag on its multiple buildings, whose name desperately translates to âConnecting Townâ in Arabic.
Dressed as an Iranian soldier from the war with Iraq, I documented the areas in the California Desert that have been historically built to resemble the Middle East for industrial, militarized and entertainment purposes, while all three inseparable, overlapping and interwoven. The footage is overlaid with oral interviews I have conducted with U.S. war veterans about their memories of the landscape in the different parts of the Middle East where they were deployed. In this way, the film is intended to blend fiction and reality, dream and waking life as testimony to continued violence. It creates a surreal collage connecting the two regions across the decades through war and colonialism, while the palm tree continues to link my visual memories of the war-torn Shatt al-Arab (during the Iran-Iraq war) to the militarized Southern California desert.
Credits
Written and edited by: Gelare Khoshgozaran
Additional camera operator: Dicky Bahto
Field recording and sound design: Jimena Sarno
Voice recording and mixing: Christopher Cole
Colorist: Caitlin DĂaz
Film processing and digital transfer: FOTOKEM
Music for dream sequence: Omid Walizadeh
Music for dance sequence: âAhvazâ by Makan Ashgvari
Voice-over excerpts selected from interviews with Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans:
River Rainbow OâMahoney Hagg, Lou, Kasey, Julien Bellin, James, Eddie
Voices:
Devin Clark, Tyler Connaghan, Sally Glass, Derek Sasco
Thanks to:
Gosia Herc-Balaszek, Hillary Mushkin, Perry Supa, Eliot Yasumura, The Echo Park Film Center, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and The Hammer Museum
Further research and writing:
Terrorientalist Landscapes
Between You and Me: a Conversation with Dan Bustillo
Image Credit: Gelare Khoshgozaran, installation view, Made in L.A. 2018, June 3 â September 2, 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photos: Brian Forrest
Medina Wasl: Connecting Town, stills. Courtesy Gelare Khoshgozaran
Source:Â https://gelarekhoshgozaran.com/VISUAL/Medina-Wasl-Connecting-Town