One of Iraq’s most beautiful natural wonders and a cradle of surviving Sumerian traditions, the southern marshes now evoke more grief than awe.
Aymen Al-Ameri reflects upon their deterioration in An Imaginary Museum on the Ground, a photography exhibition that opened in July at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Far from mere documentation, the project comes after a decade of journeys into the marshes, capturing their threatened beauty and showing why they are a cause worth fighting for.
Al-Ameri first began visiting the wetlands in 2015. As a photographer, he was drawn to the landscape he had long admired in images and in the paintings that adorned many Iraq homes. In person, the marshes were even more breathtaking, with labyrinths of reeds, branching waterways and lakes flat between the Tigris and Euphrates, glinting green, blue and gold.
“It’s out of the world, honestly,” Al-Ameri, a photographer at The National, says. “You can see the sky in the river’s reflection. The water is very clean and clear.”
Al-Ameri spend significant time learning about the area from the Marsh Arabs – also known as the Ahwaris – who have lived in the southern marshlands for centuries, navigating by canoe, herding water buffalo and preserving traditions that dates back to Sumer, the ancient civilisation that flourished between the fifth and third millennium BCE.
“Everything I had seen in the National Museum of Iraq was suddenly in front of me,” Al-Ameri says. “The houses, the outfits they wear, how they fish, what they eat. Everything I saw in the museum, I saw in real life.”
After his first trip, Al-Ameri began taking routine journeys to the southern marshes, a drive that can take up to seven hours from his native Baghdad. However, with each visit, he began noticing the gradual decline of the area’s natural resources. The wetlands had only just begun reclaiming their old splendour after Saddam Hussein’s campaign to drain them, a move aimed at crushing political resistance among Marsh Arabs and opening the land for agriculture and oil extraction.
But in recent years, upstream dam projects, particularly in Turkey and Iran, have again imperilled the marshes, threatening both their biodiversity and the livelihoods of the people who depend on them.
“Everyone wants the water,” Al-Ameri says. “For the past five years, there has been little to no rain. There is also a shortage of the right people needed to deal with these issues.”
Al-Ameri’s photographs show the effects of these projects. Images of cracked earth, beached boats and parched expanses sharply contrast photographs taken earlier, showing buffaloes bathing in the waters and people rowing along the banks in their canoes.
The architectural heritage of the Ahwaris is also visible, notably with the mudhif, houses with arching designs that are made using reeds harvested from the area. It often has ceremonial functions, being used for weddings, funerals and other large social gatherings. Several of the mudhifs in Al-Ameri's photographs are dilapidated by time and neglect, especially as a portion of the local population have begun moving to urban areas.
“It's a beautiful life when there is water,” Al-Ameri says. “But it’s very easy to destroy this life when the water levels go down. In the first few years, we saw the damage to the people, to the fishing, birds, the buffaloes, but they still managed. They found a way. But year by year, the water levels continued to drop and the heat continued to rise.”
These environmental issues also threaten the region’s history and attachment to a millennia-long culture. “It was linked to Sumer and 6,000 years of history,” Al-Ameri says. “If the situation continues like this, in 20 years, the marshes won’t exist any more and most of the people there will have moved to the cities, their children will forget their culture.”
After years of challenges and frustrations related to drought, people in the marshes are already feeling disconnected from the land, Al-Ameri says. “They’ve got tired. There’s little hope. Before they’d talk about how they loved the land and the water. Now when they talk, it’s mostly negative and their singing during their gatherings have become sad.”
The situation, Al-Ameri says, is layered. He wanted to do his best to capture this complexity through his photographs but also to present these issues in a novel manner during his residency at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. He wanted to position the photographs in a way that compelled visitors to scan and sift through them with an intimate and thoughtful eye. To simply hang them on the wall wouldn't do.
Instead, Al-Ameri spread a thousand photographs across the floor of the exhibition and in the halls that led to the space. The photographs were arranged in forms that allude to the waterways of the marshes. But there was also another reason that Al-Ameri opted to have the photographs on the floor.
The idea came after a visit to the outskirts of the ancient city of Babylon. Standing on a mound covered in soil, Al-Ameri realised that fragments of history, quite literally, were buried beneath his feet – with ancient pieces of clay, stones and other antiquities peeking out of the earth.
“So, I decided to display the photographs on the ground,” Al-Ameri says. “Like how we found prior civilisations underneath us, I wanted people to sit on the floor and look through the photographs, to excavate for the treasures of the marshes. I also included photographs of artefacts and objects from the marshes, taken from different museums.”
Al-Ameri says the exhibition in Paris helped introduce the history and richness of the marshes to an international audience. An Imaginary Museum on the Ground – which is part of Sarab, a larger project dedicated to the marshes – will have another run in the French capital, exhibiting at Galerie B50 in September.
“When I did this exhibition in Cite, I wanted to talk to the international audience so that they can think and feel of the environmental dangers around them. It was especially relevant with the recent heatwave in Paris. I also wanted them to see a different image of the Middle East and Iraq.”
But Al-Ameri also intends to bring the exhibition back home. An Imaginary Museum on the Ground will be showing at the French Institute in both Baghdad and Erbil in December. He wants to highlight the environmental aspect of the situation in the marshes to local audiences, with an added message.
“I want to show that it’s full of history. And that we have these treasures that we need to fight for.”
