Afghanistan

You are currently browsing the archive for the Afghanistan category.

QuiltMap of insurgent network in Khost region 2010

QuiltMap of insurgent network in Khost region 2010

Human Terrain and Relational Infiltration Teams (HuTRITs) use social craft techniques to infiltrate, classify and trace local loyalties and tribe constellations which are otherwise hard for military commanders to decipher. HuTRITs use local craft techniques to reach deeper into the social fabric of the afghan tribes, often trying to reach working women to help out mapping out local insurgent influence stratagems.

With the help of an established coded quilt system, maps of clan networks and links to insurgents are smuggled out to the NATO forces hidden in the layout of Afghan quilts. With US artisans trained in community quilt-making, a popular aesthetic amongst artists working with “social practice”, the HuTRITs teach women the codes and the secret quilts help unveil the enemy constellations for more surgical strikes and liquidations of adversaries by SEAL teams.

Leaked quilt code manual: 5MQ-2013×2

Loot Identification Playing Cards (LIPC) 2007

Loot Identification Playing Cards (LIPC) 2007

In spring 2002, CARPA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles developed a set of playing cards to help troops in Afghanistan identify the most-wanted carpets for the Getty collections, mostly antique and specific styles of patterns that have been sought after by collectors over the last decades. The cards, officially called the Loot Identification Playing Cards (LIPC), nicknamed “the swag deck,” has apparently been printed in several updated editions since then and distributed amongst personnel in the forward-operating teams.

Several times over the last decades, the J. Paul Getty Museum has been in looting scandals, including the 1640 Pieter Molijn painting “Landscape With Cottage and Figures” the Getty says it bought in good faith at a 1972 auction. In 1999 the Getty Museum handed back to Greece a red-figure kylix from the 5th-century BC, signed by the painter Onesimos and the potter Euphronios, that had been looted from the Etruscan site of Cerveteri. In 2010 they were revealed to have acquired fresco paintings from Pompeii through clandestine channels. The former curator at the Getty, Dr. Marion True, is on trial in Italy on conspiracy charges for the looting. The full extent of the CARPA-Getty collaboration is only now starting to appear.

According to UNESCO, almost no antiques remain in Afghanistan today.

Adraskan Afghan rug, Sabzwar, Western Afghanistan. Disappeared  from Herat Museum of Folk Art in 2009, probably now at Getty.

Adraskan Afghan rug, Sabzwar, Western Afghanistan. Disappeared from Herat Museum of Folk Art in 2009, probably now at Getty.

Leatherneck

With the e-flux-powered network “Do It,” the neo-liberal infiltration of fluxes art finally meets the frontiers of rural Afghan communities.

Socially engaged practices have been part of the US counterinsurgency strategy for nearly a decade, but after years of struggle this initiative, developed between the Pentagon and Eric Brost, a former collaborator of Hans-Ulrich Obrist, have finally reached the Afghan mountains. The über-curator Hans-Ulrich started the Do It collaborations in 1993. Over the past 20 years, exhibitions and events on the classic Fluxus theme of “Do It”, or various modes of Do-It-Yourself Art, have been staged across various biennials and internationally renowned galleries. Engaging famed artists from Damien Hirst and Yoko Ono to David Lynch and Ólafur Elíasson, as contributors, the exhibition has reached deep into the social body of western capitalism and its “alternative” art scenes. With its matter-of-fact, step-by-step socially engaging recipes, it has been a sweeping success within the global art world, from the Chelsea galleries to the emerging street scenes. Now its latest incarnation has finally reached its height, infiltrating Taliban resistance in the rural Helmand province in Afghanistan with social aesthetics. Finally, Do It: The Compendium (2013) has reached the forward-operating Socially Engaged Art (SEA) teams in the villages.

These teams operate in close collaboration with the ethnographers and sociologists from the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) which have used similar “technologies of the self” since 2007, when HTS became a permanent US Army program. The integration of artists and artisans within the armed forces has caused several controversies over the years, not least after the 2011 CIA-CARPA-sponsored show “Crafting the Social” at Kunstwerke in Berlin, where art magazines such as Frieze and Texte Zur Kunst raised concerns. However, this has not limited the growth of the initiative nor its attractiveness amongst artists. According to BAE Systems, one of the contractors for this US strategy, the CARPA-run part of the program has grown from five deployed teams and a $20 million two-year budget in 2011, to one with 31 deployed teams and a $150 million annual budget in 2013. Questions remain however, how much good relational aesthetics will do to the civil population of the Helmand province.

With a brand new auxiliary-artist-in-residence program in Helmand, led from Camp Bastion, the main British military base in Afghanistan, the artists-in-residence can now reach deeper into the social fabric of both villages and insurgent communities. Camp Bastion, accommodating 28,000 people and two artist-run galleries, is situated northwest of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, and is also the site for the upcoming biennale of 2014. Since its founding in 2003, the base exists to be the logistics hub for ISAF operations in Helmand, as well as base for the British YBA’s self-organizing art-maker-space, called Camp Deleuze (or D-Camp). Headed by CARPA-trained artist Grant Prosper, former assistant of Tracey Emin, Camp Deleuze also houses the regional US IASTAR units (Intelligence, Art, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance).

According to the leak, the “Do It” manuals of Rirkrit Tiravanja (“Untiltled” 1994), John Balderssari (“How to Kill A Bug” 1996) and Liam Gillick (“Stay At Home And Think About How To Change Things” 1995) have been epecially powerful in the social art projects arranged for the Afghan locals in the mountain villages. However, as a critic from Frieze magazine have noticed, the Tiravanja piece has been used by the US-trained Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) around the Helmand province since early 2007 but neither improved the cuisine nor the discursive impact of Derrida amongst the locals.

The latest leak exposed to US media concerned a dispute around some of the Do It projects, when some of the artists’ payment was made in Eagle Cash (or EZpay), the cash management applications for “closed-loop” operating environments of the US Armed Forces. The artists, usually paid in US Dollars as other mercenaries, were upset that this move limited their right to leave the social conflict zone, and its Rancierian “Dissensus,” after looting both local trust as well as US tax money. While some artists suddenly saw themselves as serfs to the US state strategies, some Marxist artists, following the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, recognised that all DIY-based art was already infiltrated by capitalist hegemony.

However, during this summer, a new art incident reached the public news under the scandal concerning the establishment of “Fort Leatherneck” (Marine Expeditionary Brigade Task Force Leatherneck). Leatherneck has, since 2009, been the possible future base camp for SEA operations, as well as the site for the future Guggenheim Helmand. The scandal may risk the future development of many CARPA-sponsored Armed-Conflict-Art-Projects (ACAP) between curator general Supko and Brost, as these has been commanded directly under Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. See Fox News & Washington Post for more information about the $34 million USD Leatherneck Headquarters dispute (including two artist-run galleries and prospecting for the new Guggenheim Helmand).

310 patterns for military “blood-bracelets” revealed

Military allies do not only have several secret ceremonies of blood-brotherhood, but a leaked pattern shows how they also provide “ally-bracelets” (what in civil life are often peaceful friendship bracelets). These blood-bracelets are braided by members of special forces in different NATO countries during their missions in Afghanistan, often from conquered wool and ripped carpets under secret ceremonies in their bases while browsing censored sites, such as knitting forum Ravelry.com.

Blood-Bracelet 4392-32Army

 

Click here to view the pdf of these classified files: 1BB2013-a-x

For part 2 of this document torrent: 1BB2013-b-smX

Tags: , ,