He said silence in Iraq has been a way of life for many decades. One participant is Jawad Al Amiri, an Iraqi refugee who came to the United States in the 1980s. It will be broadcast on community radio stations across the country through Prometheus Radio Project. The first episode, on speechlessness, will launch Aug. Rakowitz and Thomas also worked with Warrior Writers, a nonprofit based in Philadelphia that helps war veterans work through their experiences using writing and art. It will be hosted by Rakowitz and features fragments of that first recording session with Abdulwahed, as well as interviews with his wife and other Iraqi refugees living in Philadelphia.
"The voice of Baghdad had lost his voice," Rakowitz said, calling him a "narrator of Iraq's history." Rakowitz recalibrated the project, which became "Radio Silence," a 10-part radio broadcast with each episode focusing on a synonym of silence, in homage to Abdulwahed.
He had to have an emergency tracheostomy and was on life support until he died seven months later.Īt Abdulwahed's funeral, his friends urged Rakowitz to continue with the project, to show how much of the country they left behind was slipping away and to help fight cultural amnesia.
Rakowitz recorded an initial and very informal session with Abdulwahed in his living room in January 2016. "One of the many initial titles was "Desert Home Companion," Rakowitz said, riffing on "A Prairie Home Companion," the radio variety show created by Garrison Keillor. It would feature Iraqi music, remembrances of the country and vintage weather reports from a happier time in Iraq. Thomas had invited artist Michael Rakowitz to Philadelphia to create a project for Mural Arts Philadelphia, which has been expanding its public art reach from murals into new and innovative spaces.Īfter nearly five years of research, Rakowitz distilled his project into a radio broadcast that would involve putting the vivacious and caramel-voiced Abdulwahed back on the air, and using Philadelphia-area Iraqi refugees and local Iraq war veterans as his field reporters. "He represented authority and respectability in relationship to the news through many different political changes," said Elizabeth Thomas, curator of "Radio Silence," a public art piece that resulted from the meeting with Abdulwahed. PHILADELPHIA: In 2016, an Iraqi-American artist sat down with Bahjat Abdulwahed - the so-called "Walter Cronkite of Baghdad" - with the idea of launching a radio project that would be part documentary, part radio play and part variety show.Ībdulwahed was the voice of Iraqi radio from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, but came to Philadelphia as a refugee in 2009 after receiving death threats from insurgents.
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