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This Giant Portrait In Pakistan Is The Face Of A US Drone Hotspot
This Giant Portrait In Pakistan Is The Face Of A US Drone Hotspot
Saks Afridi, NotABugSplatApr 7, 2014, 01:56 IST
NotABugSplatThe view from a helicopter drone.NotABugSplat is a project by Saks Afridi, Ali Rez, Akash Goel, & JR.In military slang, Predator drone operators often refer to kills as 'bug splats', since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.To challenge this insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties, an artist collective installed a massive portrait facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur. Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim's face.
NotABugSplatThese estimate are at the high end of estimates by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
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The installation is also designed to be captured by satellites in order to make it a permanent part of the landscape on online mapping sites.
The project is a collaboration of artists who made use of the French artist JR's 'Inside Out' movement. Reprieve/Foundation for Fundamental Rights helped launch the effort which has been released with the hashtag #NotABugSplatChildren gather around the installationGround view of the gigantic poster of the child victim.The child featured in the poster is nameless, but according to FFR, lost both her parents and two young siblings in a drone attack. The group of artists traveled inside KPK province and, with the assistance of highly enthusiastic locals, unrolled the poster amongst mud huts and farms. It is their hope that this will create empathy and introspection amongst drone operators, and will create dialogue amongst policy makers, eventually leading to decisions that will save innocent lives.
