5 - Al-Bahithun: Sounds that Call to the (Oil) Fields

Summary

The Searchers

Al-Bahithun (The (Re)searchers) is an art project that highlights the link between nationalised knowledge and oil wealth. The nationalisation of the Iraqi oil industry in 1972 allowed the Iraqi state to utilise unprecedented revenues from the sale of oil. My work explores how this wealth was dependent on, and tied to, the empowerment of local expertise and how a good portion of oil revenues went into training and educational programmes as well as supporting the welfare of scientists, researchers and university graduates. My project's name is borrowed from an Iraqi film made in 1978 entitled Al-Bahithun (The Searchers).

I play on the double meaning of the Arabic term al-bahithun: ‘the searchers’, and ‘the researchers’. While the al-bahithun featured in the film are primarily oil explorers, assembled to search for oil in the marshes of Southern Iraq (al-Ahwar), in my work I explore what has been made possible by the revenue generated by these (oil) discoveries: the development of a national research culture that helped secure the autonomy of oil as an Iraqi national industry as well as the structures of power and politics underlying it. This chapter describes how the objects I featured in my art project Al-Bahithun reproduce the condition of (re)searchers who oscillated between the projects of nationalisation, knowledge, art, architecture and war as precipitated by oil. Finally, I aim to highlight how these oil movements are, as in the film, accompanied by attempts to hear the sounds that call(ed) the (re)searchers to the oil fields.

The core team featured in the film The Searchers represent a constituency of Iraqi society in the late 1970s – an engineer, a revenge-seeking peasant, a geologist and a treasure-seeking explorer. These men live and work on the water and conduct their explorations with a strange-looking tractor (Figures 5.1 and 5.2), a floating workstation equipped with telecommunication devices. When a phone call alerts the team that they are floating on a sea of oil, they explode with joy, except two of the men, who split from the group to embark on a secret search for a legendary land, a ‘lost paradise’.