how to dismantle a bomb

Laos: 2 million tons of bombs dropped by the US Secret Service. That is more than all the bombs in World War II combined. More than 40 years later, traces can still be found. This work shows how the legacy of the secret war is handled in today’s Laos. Special attention is paid to the unexploded ordnance, which is transformed into everyday objects of use, such as jewelry and souvenirs. It becomes absurd when a man, injured by an unexploded bomb, starts walking again with a prosthesis made from bomb parts.

In the search for these artifacts, film recordings, conversations and pictures were made. A local craftsman was hired to make a Camera Obscura from bomb scraps. With this, unique photographs were created on site using an analog development process on direct-positive paper. A selection of the collected material has now been merged into an overall project and (re)contextualized in an installation consisting of the video, photographs, text fragments, Objects and performative gestures. 

The project and the actions that are undertaken can be read as a gesture. The bomb is defused both through the reuse by the local population and through artistic transformation and contextualization. In this way, other levels of meaning are created without marginalizing the problem. Destructive objects of war are transformed into new objects whose meanings may well be positive. This process questions the meaning of the weapons industry, but also evokes ambivalent feelings when considering the aestheticization of war by means of its traces.