Medina Wasl: Connecting Town

Overview

Medina Wasl: Connecting Town (2018) was shot at various sites in the California desert that resemble Middle Eastern towns, including those designed specifically to mirror the Middle East for US military training. One of these mock villages, Medina Wasl, located at Fort Irwin National Military Training Center in California’s Mojave Desert, has become a tourist destination where the public can visit and witness troops engaging in simulated battles. Video footage of these sites is accompanied by audio recordings of interviews Khoshgozaran conducted with US war veterans about their memories of the landscape in the various Middle Eastern locations where they were stationed. As with Khoshgozaran’s earlier works, Medina Wasl: Connecting Town meditates on precarious and problematic relationships between speculation, representation, memory, and trauma.