The Ornithology of War, 2005

Exhibited at: Jonson Gallery of the University Art Museum, UNM, Albuquerque, NM in 2005. Dimensions: Variable. Materials: red paint, fabric, mailing tags, nails, wooden ammunition box, oil, rope, hardware.

In May 2003, George W. Bush declared an end to major combat in the war in Iraq. Almost three years later, today, the death toll of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians and soldiers is deafening. Every day that this war continues, the lists of named deaths is added to. In Iraq, there is a net of grief that is stitched from the guts of those present. It hangs over lives lost, men & women- young to old- who have been taken for a muddled cause. Their histories, presences, and spirits knot the ropes between the large circumference of questions and miscommunications that twist up and out of this strange war.

The Ornithology of War, which began in 2004 and was shown in 2005, began out of my own frustration and sorrow at the atrocities unfolding in Iraq. It became impossible for me to imagine making work that did not address the amount of destruction that has been caused by this war based on muddled causes, insufficient information, and strangely misplaced defenses that this is all a struggle against terrorism. I was outraged that pictures of American soldiers returning home in American-flag covered coffins were not presented by the media. I was infuriated by the images given of the conflict, images that showed a Hollywood-version of warfare, with tanks riding against the sunset in the desert.

It was not until 2004, when I had the fortune of seeing Rahim Alhaj, a local oud musician who is originally from Iraq, speak at UNM, that I saw accurate images of the destruction of the cities of Iraq. He showed images of children playing inside of small, marked off places in their neighborhoods, so that they would not be contaminated by the inches of sewage that filled their streets. He showed images of hospitals that had no supplies, and were too full to accommodate patients' needs. He spoke of the tragedies that have befallen once beautiful and booming cities such as Baghdad.

This piece began out of a need to reach the intangible situations within Iraq, to stitch a net of consciousness between here and there for Americans to access. This piece started as a way to protest, to remind us that tragedy is still occurring every minute. But most importantly, this piece was meant as a space of MEMORIAM.

As I researched the war in Iraq, it became apparent that the human losses from within Iraq were not the only tragedy of the war- the native birds of the lands have all but been obliterated from the fumes of oil fires, the heat of bomb explosions and the burning and stripping of their habitats due to occupation.

The Mesopotamian Marshlands, which are these birds’ habitat, were already highly impacted by the first Gulf War, and in the years following, Saddam Hussein drained the marshlands, to prevent insurgent revolutionary rebels located within the area from rising up against his regime. The size of the Mesopotamian marshlands was once the size of the Florida Everglades. As a result of the two Gulf Wars, scientists report that the marshlands have shrunk from 15,000 square kilometers to 50. The native birds affected by this war, the Basra Reed Warblers in particular, are now misplaced, without a habitat, much like many of the communities of Iraq. The Reed Warblers are flying into the windows of the Endangered Species list, where scientists sitting in labs on the other side of the planet document and monitor their dying survival. These birds, which have been native to the region for centuries, are looking at utter extinction, proving that warfare and strife has not only scarred the country's people, but also the landscapes of their land.

I began to imagine the Basra Reed Warblers as contemporary carrier pigeons, traveling and landing on American doorsteps with the names and dates and numbers of deaths occurring from this war. They came as effigies for the lost. Birds are a spiritual symbol of the human soul being released from the physical constraints of the earth, so with this piece I wanted to visualize room for hope amidst the realization of tragedy.

The piece consisted of a room painted a deep red, the color of blood or the womb. The room had two wide doors, which gave the piece a feel of transition. My intention with the room was to create a memorial space, which completely immersed the viewer in a place of recognition and acknowledgement. On two walls, thousands of hand-written tags, bearing the names of lives lost of all nationalities, were hung in rows, blanketing the walls. On the fourth wall, multiple fabric hand-sewn birds spilled over the archway of one of the doors, and from the archway hung two bottles of honey-colored motor oil, on a pulley, referencing a scale. On the third wall, rows of empty nails were placed, resembling a military graveyard. On the floor of the gallery, an old wooden military ammunition box held multiple blank tags, for the viewer’s use in adding names that might not have been recorded, or for recording names on the tags that the viewers chose to take away from the piece.

My hopeful intention behind The Ornithology of War was to construct a space for the people to simultaneously remember and protest the sadness of this war. For myself, writing out the names of those lives lost connected me to each of those individuals, and the idea of having viewers take names with them and pass those names on was my hope to extend this experience of personal involvement further.