You find yourself at the intersection of memory, power, and silence.

You enter a city rendered whole—restored walls, polished history, everything where it should be. Al-Turaif loads seamlessly. The past performs itself, but not without tension.

Voices drift in—from elsewhere. A valley long rerouted. A district dense with noise and languages. They don’t appear on this map, yet their presence reverberates through it.

Here, sound is not a backdrop—it is infrastructure, inscription, force. It shapes how space is occupied, narrated, and denied. History is not given; it is produced, negotiated in both omissions and excess.

In this space, they collide.

What you hear is not a restoration. It is a suggestion. A possibility. A disturbance.

You are not here to discover. You are here to dwell in the uncertainty. To test what holds, what skips, what resists, not only what was, but what could have been, or should have been heard.

Do not attempt to follow the map nor a path. Listen instead. Listen beyond hearing, to what resists capture. Toward a past heard in fragments, never in full…

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Do not attempt to follow the map.

Listen instead. Listen beyond hearing, to what resists capture.

Toward a past heard in fragments, never in full.

Remember:

What you hear and what you don’t both tell a story.


This project is a screen-based reworking of a now-unavailable virtual tour of Al-Turaif Heritage Site, overlaying archival sound fragments and speculative audio traces onto the original interface. Through interruption, noise, and absence, the work reimagines the tour as an unstable archive—one that leaks.



Map Error: Simulation Build 2056 is a speculative simulation built from a now-unavailable virtual tour of Al-Turaif Heritage Site—a digital interface once designed to guide users through a restored version of the site and its official historical narrative. It invites imaginary players into a simulation that becomes increasingly unstable. The virtual environment begins with coherence, but over time, ruptures emerge. New sounds overlay official ones. The logics of space and memory come undone. The player is abruptly placed within a shifting historical landscape constructed through a series of georeferenced historical maps. These overlays, drawn from different regimes, languages, and time periods, resist a single authoritative view of the city. Instead, they reveal how space has been imagined, claimed, and redrawn over centuries. The experience leads to one site: Al-Turaif, a heritage zone presented as a stabilized and official point of origin. It is rendered through restored architecture, linear storytelling, and carefully designed soundscapes—offering a vision of history that is continuous, ordered, and complete. Until the map breaks. And the archive begins to leak. As the player moves through the speculative simulation, interference begins—not as a flaw in the system, but as a reminder of what was never stored. Sonic fragments from Wadi Hanifah and Al-Bat’ha begin to surface: places not visible in the official reconstruction, but still resonant in the city’s sensory memory.

Wadi Hanifah evokes a layered ecological and rural history—waterways and birds that once shaped the terrain but were buried beneath development and narrative design.

Al-Bat’ha brings forward the dense sonic fabric of migrant labor, commercial intensity, and multilingual life—histories lived daily but rarely enter the archive.

These interruptions are not errors to be corrected. They are traces of parallel timelines—histories that unfolded outside the bounds of the authorized narrative. In this simulation, the player is not asked to complete a quest or correct the past. Instead, they are invited to listen—to the contradictions, the background noise, the silence that holds memory in suspension. The project draws on speculative archival practices, where the goal is not to recover a singular truth but to trace what was excluded, what could have been, or what might still emerge. It is informed by oral histories, which resist the neatness of official record-keeping and preserve memory through voice, repetition, and community. It also draws from traditions of fabulation—not to fictionalize the past, but to create space for alternative possibilities when formal sources are missing, restricted, or incomplete.

This is not a game of historical reconstruction. It is a reflection on how history is told, how urban space is remembered, and how listening—deep, intentional, speculative listening—can uncover what was left out, covered over, or deliberately erased. Rather than offering a resolved vision of the past, the project proposes an open-ended archive—one shaped by dissonance, absence, and imagination. It is a space where multiple histories may have existed, and where multiple futures can still be imagined.

In this framework, the map is not a guide.
The archive does not preserve, it curates absence.
And sound is not atmosphere, it is a site of possibility.

Citations

Azoulay, Ariella. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.
Bayat, Asef. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Mattern, Shannon. Deep Mapping the Media City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24.
Raqs Media Collective. Seepage. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Soja, Edward W. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Map Sources

David Rumsey Map Collection, Accessed March 2025 https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/view/search?q=saudi+arabia+&annotSearch=.
Google Earth. Aerial and Satellite Imagery for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Accessed March 2025. https://earth.google.com.
Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. "Maps of Saudi Arabia, 1400-2025." Accessed March 2025. https://www.loc.gov/maps.

Sound and Visual Sources

Almogbil, Alhanouf. Field recordings from Al Turaif, Wadi Hanifa, and Al Bathaa. Unpublished raw soundscape data, December 2024–January 2025.

Audio Archives

"برنامج في ظلال النخيل اذاعة الرياض من تسجيلي قبل نحو٢٥عام" Youtube video, posted by سعد بن ناعم 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Iy3MiOQAs.
من الأرشيف: إذاعة المملكة العربية السعودية من الرياض نشرة الأخبار 1991م”, Youtube video, posted by Saudi Broadcasting Archive, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbXNmRIf8cM.