Fenced within the silent cold walls, HD film, CGI, time: 12 minutes 29 seconds

This CGI film reconstructs my former home in Iraq, a site my family cannot return to. The house is rebuilt in high-resolution detail, but it functions less as a refuge than as a data set: walls, corridors, and rooms mapped with clinical precision. The camera tracks through the interior without pause, surveying a space that is intact in form yet structurally inaccessible.

Screens power on. Archived images detach from televisions and computer monitors, slipping into the room as three-dimensional entities. They do not haunt, they occupy. These digital forms multiply and accelerate, overriding the domestic architecture and destabilizing its boundaries. The home is no longer a container of memory, but a surface breached by it.

Nearing the end a voice over in Arabic by my grandmother’s cuts through the visual field. She describes burning sentimental objects before fleeing. As she speaks, rendered replicas of these items appear, fully modeled and momentarily present. They then glitch, fragment, and dissolve. The film does not attempt recovery. Instead, it stages return as simulation and loss as process, exposing the limits of reconstruction within digital space.