"Liberation Range" by Francesca
da Rimini
Artist Statement, June 2003
http://www.thing.net/~dollyoko/subtle
"Operation Iraqi Freedom is the multinational coalition effort to liberate the Iraqi people, eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and end the regime of Saddam Hussein." United States Department of Defense
The components of Liberation Range, a website and a 3 minute video, were commissioned for the Subtle Body jewellry exhibition curated by Anton Hart for the JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design gallery in Adelaide during May 2003. The work (featuring sound by Roman composer Daniele Salvati, models from the chilling world of Saló by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and recent military technology contracts awarded by the United States Department of Defense) is offered as a catalogue for a range of ghostly body adornments for the new epoch of globalised Perma War. I have long been fascinated by ethnographic museums, wherein the visitor may find examples of exquisitely crafted jewellry and costumes and artefacts alongside weapons and armoury, themselves often elegantly decorated. These melancholic repositories of culture contain historical and ethno-specific traces of the human impulse to both create beauty and destroy life.
Liberation Range was created as my country, Australia, along with the US and Britain, was in the process of invading Iraq, in what many of us continue to believe to be an unjust and illegal war and occupation. During the day I would make collages of passive and abused bodies adorned with the latest expensive weaponry, and during the evenings I would watch the sanitised and highly censored television news services documenting the progress of the relentless aerial bombardment of cities with beautiful melodic names - Karbalaa, Fallujah, Nasiriyah. Very occasionally one Australian broadcaster would show some footage from Al-Jazeera of the dying and wounded, and with great sadness and respect I used one of these brutal images in this work, the ultimate model for the Liberation Range of jewellry.