backAuthor: Maees Hadi
Title: NCV=0
Site: Elsewhere
Coordinates: Unknown
NCV=0 is a research and dive into memories. Memories that show you a normal, they show you yourself, places that may look like your home or the town you grew up in, but they tell you about displacement, about sanctions, and about a war that followed and stayed.
These reconstructions of memories are not representations of reality, because nothing can be.
History itself is objective, an abstraction formed by subjective representation and for the displaced to be more than a representation they have to acknowledge the representation but be apart from what it represents.
”NVC=0”
Non-Combatant casualty cutoff value.
Is a number that is secretly determined within the US military and approved by the president and the secretary of defence and then included in a military operation rule that determines how many civilian that are okay to die proportionate to the task.
MANIFESTO
To abstract is to produce and to produce is to control and build.
While all systems of power depend on abstraction to produce their power, they also take advantage of other existing systems; history, representation, the internet…
The curated representation by the strategy of warfare that abstracts the individual in war and in diaspora is powerful but becomes even more effective when fed into an existing system of circulation - the circulating image/representation virtually. This image enters a system of a controlled and temporary consumption through multiple platforms on our phones, effecting identities and realities because they become less about depicting the individual and more about positioning individuals is society.
And yet we, the displaced, the migrating bodies don’t quite know where we belong.
As we are part of this positioning but don’t really recognise ourselves or the spaces that we have existed in, we have histories and presents where war exists, but we don’t recognise it.
As war becomes part of our identity and follows us outside of the temporal and spatial dimensions of the site of impact, the violence experienced from far acquire a slowness as it becomes life and life is slow. This is a manifestation of the interconnectedness of warfare. The power it has by itself and together with other systems of control and power.
The seven reconstruction that compose the NCV=0 approach the topic of warfare and the experience of political violence not from the two dominant perspectives that form the mainstream narratives on this topic (perpetrator vs victim) instead the project aims to investigate a perspective that belongs to a removed second generation from experiencing such violence, a perspective that is purposeless but immanent in the experience of around 1 million of Iraqi second generation people living abroad.
The film is not constructed to tell the memories in a linear way but jumps both in time and space, and tells narratives from experiences and memories from 1990s Gulf War, and the sanctions during that period, also memories from the 2003 American invasion and also from Sweden where war followed.
These reconstructions try to communicate a specific condition of displacement and detachment and the reality of a migrant subject, where warfare could be traced in daily mundane settings, an ordinary Swedish home, the city, the sky, the bathroom, the cafe and the hallway. These spaces become a background to this social condition.
Because of the nature of these second-hand experiences and memories film was used as a tool to express these temporal ad spatial dimensions. These reconstructions do not aim to reconstruct a physical reality, because I don’t believe I can nor interested in doing so. But rather a different kind of reality that perhaps is not tangible and subjective. Therefore, the films are constructed using found footage, still frames and models, each creating a recontextualization of the experience of violence, which is excavated psychologically through the footage I choose. These films suddenly represented calm interior images of mundane settings of everyday life which is particular in the way war experienced.
The film became a crucial tool to use to investigate the narrative capacity of space generating a more universal tool to communicate personal experiences of war and trauma through sound, dialog, light and composition.
The architectural practice became more like the framework in which these films were constructed, where understanding of space is important to be able to create atmospheres and reconstructions that invite the viewer to feel. They are based on explorations that are composed by ideas, reflections, plans, maps, conversations.
What becomes crucial is that they are composed by a specific consciousness, reconstructed by a migrant subject with has a particular imagination, ideas and stories.
The End.