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E21 Ullman's sand maps of memory scapes return with a twist in Sharabani's project, Virtual Territories (2019), which experiments with digitally manipulating satellite views derived from Google Earth. One geographical site chosen for experimentation is the Iraqi city of Basrah, formerly home to the artist's family. Sharabani's family, along with most of Iraq's Jewish population, fled Iraq in the wake of anti-Jewish persecution, which peaked in the Farhud pogrom of June 1941. 16 After a decade's tribulation, practically the entire Jewish population left Iraq in 1951, shocked by the sudden collapse of their participation in the country's economic and cultural life. 17 Forced, by a specially legislated decree, to forfeit their citizenship and private property upon leaving, Jews have been unable to return since, even to visit. 18 While Sharabani's grandfather had long relinquished any desire to reestablish contact with Basrah, the artist found an outlet for his interest in the remote satellite views of Google Earth. The manipulated satellite images of Basrah presented in Virtual Territories neither disclose the artist's family history nor reveal any trace of the millennia of Jewish life in the region. These satellite-mediated views neutralize the memory of violence and trauma, affording what the artist regards as analytical distance – at the cost of masking traumatic memories, both personal and collective. In choosing to resort to Google Earth's global views, Sharabani sends us into orbit, in an inverse spatial movement to Ullman's digging in the earth. And yet, Sharabani experiments with the possibility of transforming the lost ground into a solid object, in a manner reminiscent of the ancient art of bas-relief. Presented as if in low relief, the views of Basrah fromouter space bring tomind archaeological excavation sites – as if they unearth the ancient foundations of vanished civilizations. Onework fromamong Virtual Territories named Basrah #4 (figure 13a, 13b, see p. 20), for example, is a digital simulation of a tabletop relief carved in sandstone, featuring a satellite view of Basrah. In other iterations, such as Basrah #3 (figure 14), Sharabani has added a bronze tint to the satellite image. This brings tomindMesopotamian art, thereby forging a connection between twenty-first-century Iraq and the region's remote past under the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. In turn, this nod to the region's history invokes the primal Jewish trauma of displacement and exile, under Babylon in the seventh century BCE. Returning full circle to Modern Iraq, Virtual 16 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2019. The Farhud. Holocaust Encyclopedia. Online encyclopedia entry. Available online: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-farhud (accessed 15 October 2019). 17 Bashkin, Orit. 2012. New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq . Stanford: Stanford University Press. 18 The Museum of the Jewish People. 2019. Iraq: The Jews of Babylon and Iraq. Beit Hatfutsot Databases. Online encyclopedia entry. Available online: https://dbs.bh.org.il/place/iraq (accessed 15 October 2019).