‘Black water’, 2011
Occurring wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and looming ones in Syria and Iran are continuously re-enacted in fictive sites, which bear an uncanny, populist, rhetorical and thetrical resemblance to their original counterparts.
This footage is of 'real' destruction caused by NATO bombing in Libya in Zintan and Misurata, as well as Arabic towns purposefully built by the USA and Israeli armies in their respective countries*: the former taken from witnesses' reports and the latter from army training for prospective wars in a generalised 'Middle East'.
The 'captcha' phrases which allow access to the videos are extrapolated from private email conversations exchanged at the beginning of the Libyan uprising.
*Blackwater Urban Warfare training camp (Pendelton, USA), the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat centre (29 Palms, USA), or IDF Tactical training centre (Negev desert, Israel)