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Trained Pigeons Challenged the Embargo Before U.S. Embassy was Set to Open in Havana, Cuba
As Secretary of State John Kerry prepares to fly to Cuba for a ceremony Friday to open the U.S. Embassy in Havana, we speak with an artist here at the Venice Biennale who used art to challenge the U.S. embargo of Cuba. For his project called "Trading with the Enemy," Duke Riley spent four years planning and eight months breeding and homing a kit of 50 pigeons in Key West, Florida. His goal was to prove that pigeons could make the 90-mile flight from Havana back to Key West carrying Cuban Cohiba cigars, which are banned in the United States. Riley also installed video cameras on the pigeons. He began with 50 pigeons. Eleven returned.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Venice, Italy. But Secretary of State John Kerry is heading to fly to Cuba for a ceremony Friday to open the U.S. Embassy in Havana, so we’re going to turn now to an artist who’s here in Venice who used art to challenge the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Duke Riley is with us, spent four years planning and eight months breeding and homing a kit of 50 pigeons in Key West, Florida. His goal was to prove that pigeons could make the 90-mile flight from Havana back to Key West carrying Cuban cigars, which are banned in the United States. Riley also installed video cameras on the pigeons. He began with 50 pigeons. Eleven returned. Duke Riley called the project "Trading with the Enemy." Duke Riley joins us now here in Venice, Italy, at the Venice Biennale, the oldest, most prestigious art exhibition in the world.
Duke, welcome to Democracy Now!
DUKE RILEY: Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you did. People are scratching their heads.
DUKE RILEY: Well, pretty much what you described. And I was pretty impressed that you used the word "kit." That was pretty good. Yeah, so, basically, yeah, I trained—I spent about four years planning and about eight months training some homing pigeons to carry Cuban cigars from—
AMY GOODMAN: Wait. How did you do this? I mean, how do you train them?
DUKE RILEY: Well, pigeons have a natural ability to—homing pigeons have a natural ability to find their way back home. And then you just sort of keep taking them—
AMY GOODMAN: So you released them in Cuba?
DUKE RILEY: I don’t really go into too much detail as to how the pigeons got into Cuba. But they did, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, what kind of cigars did you strap around each one?
DUKE RILEY: They were Cohibas, sort of the most coveted.
AMY GOODMAN: On each of these pigeons.
DUKE RILEY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And—
DUKE RILEY: And they were like sort of little harnesses that were made out of bra straps.
AMY GOODMAN: And cameras, as well?
DUKE RILEY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And they flew to Key West, Florida?
DUKE RILEY: Exactly, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Were you aware there’s a trade embargo? Were the pigeons?
DUKE RILEY: You know, I didn’t get into a very serious political discussion with the pigeons, but I was definitely aware of the trade embargo and with the—obviously, with the Trading with the Enemy Act. And that was definitely [inaudible].
AMY GOODMAN: So, how do you know the pigeons made it to Key West?
DUKE RILEY: Well, there was, you know, a loft that they were homed out of, and that’s where they returned to with the cigars. And, you know—
AMY GOODMAN: And their cameras successfully filmed their voyage?
DUKE RILEY: Yeah, yeah. Well, that was—it was important that we—as I said, yeah, there was 50 pigeons, and 25 of them I trained to carry the cigars, and 25 to carry these very tiny cameras so that I could film the process and prove that it actually happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Secretary of State Kerry is headed to Cuba right now, and, well, at least relations are going to begin to be normalized with the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, the flag being raised, the one in Havana. We covered just a few weeks ago the one in Washington, D.C. Your thoughts, as an artist who, well, attempted to break the embargo a little while ago?
DUKE RILEY: Yeah, well, I think that when I was doing the project, I was, you know, mainly concerned more with the fact that I feel that the Trading with the Enemy Act is completely unconstitutional and is different than an embargo, actually, because it’s the—
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got five seconds.
DUKE RILEY: Yeah, well—I’m not very good at this.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us.
DUKE RILEY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Duke Riley did the "Trading with the Enemy" project, and we’ll link to it at democracynow.org.
Artist Emily Jacir Brings the Palestinian Experience to the Venice Biennale
At the Venice Biennale, the oldest and most prestigious international biennial art exhibition in the world, we speak with one of the most celebrated Palestinian artists, Emily Jacir. In 2007, she won the Golden Lion here at the Venice Biennale for her work "Material for a Film," a large-scale installation based on the life of Palestinian writer Wael Zuaiter, who was assassinated near his home in Rome, Italy, by Israeli Mossad agents in 1972. For years Jacir has created groundbreaking art to capture the Palestinian experience and other issues. In 2001, she presented a piece titled "Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948," consisting of a large refugee tent on which the names of 418 Palestinians villages were embroidered. She later did a project called "ex libris" that commemorated the approximately 30,000 books from Palestinian homes, libraries and institutions that were looted by Israeli authorities in 1948.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Venice, Italy, the site of the Venice Biennale, the oldest and most prestigious international biennial art exhibition in the world. The theme of this year is "All the World’s Futures." You may hear inside where we’re broadcasting outside today at the Arsenale, in the midst of Venice, people singing.
Well, we’re beginning today with one of the most celebrated Palestinian artists, Emily Jacir. In 2007, she won the Golden Lion here at the Venice Biennale for her work, "Material for a Film." It was a large-scale installation based on the life of Palestinian writer Wael Zuaiter, who was assassinated near his home in Rome, Italy, by Israeli Mossad agents in 1972. For years, Emily has created groundbreaking art to capture the Palestinian experience and other issues. In 2001, she presented—titled "Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948." The piece consisted of a large refugee tent with the names of 418 Palestinian villages embroidered on it. She later did a project called "ex libris," that commemorated the approximately 30,000 books from Palestinian homes, libraries and institutions that were looted by Israeli authorities in 1948. Emily Jacir is speaking here at the Creative Time Summit as part of the Venice Biennale.
And we welcome you to Democracy Now!
EMILY JACIR: Thank you. I am so excited to be here. I just have to say this because my father is probably your biggest fan.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, thank God for fathers. So, Emily, you gave a remarkable speech here yesterday, where you, as, well, a person not from Venice, though you lived in Rome, gave us a tour of Venice, a kind of geopolitical cultural tour that most people are not privileged to get. Talk about what many visitors may miss.
EMILY JACIR: Yesterday I spoke about a project I made for the 2009 Biennial called "Stazione," which was a public intervention that was meant to take place on the 25 vaporetto stops, the vaporetto being the water bus line, the water bus stops, that runs through the heart of Venice. And what I did was I translated each of the names into Arabic and placed the Arabic names next to the Italian, creating a bilingual transportation route into the city. And what inspired this project was a two-year period of researching the history of Venice, when it was really interdependent with the rest of the Mediterranean, and I was interested in exploring the heritage, the shared heritage, Venice shares with the Arab world. So, for example, the very first book ever printed, mechanically printed in Arabic, was called the Book of Hours, and it was printed here in Venice—I think it’s 1514—by Gregorio de Gregorii. Another highlight from that research was the first mechanically printed Qur’an in the world was printed here in Venice by Alessandro and Paganino Paganini in 1537. And the glassblowing technique that Venice is so famous for was actually developed in Palestine.
AMY GOODMAN: The Murano glass.
EMILY JACIR: The glassblowing—the technique of glassblowing, because this was from a period where there was all this exchange. The border—there was no borders. Venice was like a liquid city. So it’s a shared heritage, all of this. There are words in the Venetian dialect that come from Arabic. For example, where the summit is being held, the Arsenale, it comes from the Arabic word dar al-sina’a, which means "house of manufacture." So it’s really, really, really an incredibly rich and layered history. The architecture, if you take vaporetto line one, you will see the—
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what the vaporetto is.
EMILY JACIR: The vaporetto is the water bus that you take to move around the city. It’s the bus. It’s like a bus in any city, but it’s the water bus.
AMY GOODMAN: For all folks to understand, Venice is a remarkable city of canals. There are no cars, so you either take gondolas or you take these vaporettos, which we have been on, throughout Venice. It’s kind of like a—well, a watery subway system, you could say.
EMILY JACIR: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s small ferries, right?
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And each station stop has the Italian name of the stop, like—
EMILY JACIR: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: —what? Sant’Elena.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah, exactly, or Biennale, Arsenale, San Marco. And the stops are actually these separate floating kind of platforms jutting out into the water. So the idea also of putting the Arabic next to the Italian was so that the stops would have a dialogue with the architecture along the Grand Canal, which is this incredible mixture of influences from the Arab world and here.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you did this for the—
EMILY JACIR: 2009.
AMY GOODMAN: Biennale in 2009.
EMILY JACIR: 2009, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: You were going to do this project. You were actually going to put the Arabic translations—
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —of the Italian stops on each stop.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah, we worked with the vaporetto company that’s in charge of all the lines and the bus stops, and they were really excited about the project, and they were going to fund the project, actually. And they had asked me to create a text to explain to tourists, to put on some of the stops why—what is this Arabic that is on these stations. And we were going to have an opening with the mayor of Venice. But then, shortly before the Biennale, the project was shut down.
AMY GOODMAN: By?
EMILY JACIR: The city officials. Somebody came to the head of the vaporetto company and told them that this was not to take place in Venice, which was really devastating for me because I think it’s a very important project dealing with a beautiful history, a shared history, a shared cultural heritage, and it was a secular project, which is also something that’s very important.
AMY GOODMAN: What did they tell you? So, instead you showed it in—now, at that time—there isn’t today—
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —but you showed it in the Palestinian Pavilion?
EMILY JACIR: Pavilion. It was the first Palestinian Pavilion. So what I did instead is I created—after this happened, I had to come up with something else. I created a brochure, which was a map of the project and where Biennial goers, or whoever, could follow this map and go see my project. And when they arrived, they would discover it wasn’t there, with my intention being that maybe sometime in the future people will think it was there, because I created this brochure that it actually happened, when it didn’t. It was the only way to overcome this.
AMY GOODMAN: Yet you had won the actual—what is it called?
EMILY JACIR: The Golden Lion, one of the Golden Lions.
AMY GOODMAN: The Golden Lion the year before.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah, in the 2007 Biennale, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: For?
EMILY JACIR: For my work called "Material for a Film."
AMY GOODMAN: And I want to talk about that in a minute.
EMILY JACIR: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: But on this issue of not being able to put up these signs—
EMILY JACIR: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —we’ve reported over the last few days that the Icelandic Pavilion—
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —was shut down when the artist—the pavilion was in an old church, hadn’t been used by the Catholic Church, I think, in something for like 40 years—
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —turned it into a mosque. And the Venetian authorities said no.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah. And in 2005, there was an artist called Gregor Schneider who had—was going to put a black cube in Piazza San Marco, and that also got shut down.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain the Piazza San Marco.
EMILY JACIR: Piazza San Marco is the main square of Venice where the church is. It’s beautiful.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was that black square to represent?
EMILY JACIR: It was a—well, that, the artist would have to explain; I’m not going to speak on his behalf. But that was shut down because they were scared that it would look too much like Mecca.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, the place we’re sitting right now—and some people might hear sounds of music or speakers wafting through—we’re right next to the theater where the Creative Time Summit is taking place. And we’re in an area called the Arsenale. Yes, you got it—the Arsenal. So, an old arsenal has been changed into an artist space here in Venice. But talk about the Arsenale, the significance of this area, Emily.
EMILY JACIR: Well, it’s interesting because it’s one of the things that I was talking about with the translation, because it was the place where ship building took place and where this word, dar al-sina’a, comes from, which is "house of manufacture."
AMY GOODMAN: In Arabic.
EMILY JACIR: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And it was one of the first industrial assembly lines—
EMILY JACIR: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: —where they made warships.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: A warship in a day.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Here in Venice, Italy.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking with Emily Jacir, who is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker, professor at the International Academy of Art, Palastine, in Ramallah. Her work includes a diverse range of media and strategies, including film, photography, social interventions, installation and performance, video, writing and sound. So now I want to go back to 2007, to the—
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —what you won the Golden Lion award for at the 52nd Venice Biennale, in 2008 winning the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum—
EMILY JACIR: Guggenheim.
AMY GOODMAN: —for the same thing. Explain what your—what your project was.
EMILY JACIR: Essentially, that project was about the first Palestinian, named Wael Zuaiter, who was killed by the Israeli Mossad on European soil, in 1972. The title for that project comes from the chapter of a book written by Janet Venn-Brown, who was his companion for eight years. There was a chapter called "Material for a Film," where Elio Petri, the famous Italian filmmaker, and Ugo Pirro had done a series of interviews with the people who knew Wael. Wael was very important in the cultural scene in Italy. He was the first person to bring Alberto Moravia to the Middle East. He took him to Iraq and Syria, Kuwait. And he was very involved with people like Pasolini. So this chapter—
AMY GOODMAN: And Pasolini was?
EMILY JACIR: The Italian filmmaker, Pasolini. So, this chapter—basically, I felt that I was building on their work and gathering more material for a film. So what the installation ends up being is not only about Wael, but also about my journey in finding him and the traces he left behind.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, talk about how you found him. You lived in Rome for many years.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah, yes, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: This is where he was murdered.
EMILY JACIR: Yes, yeah. I lived in Rome for many years, so there was always this specter of his death in my mind since I was a child, of this kind of impending threat. And to make that project, it actually required that I did a lot of research—it took five years—and collaborated mainly with Janet Venn-Brown, who, as I said before, was his companion. And frankly, we wouldn’t really have any information on him or his life if it wasn’t for her, because she kept every single documents, every single letter, all of his books. She held onto them. So, a lot of the work was working with her in her apartment, going through her archives, to create this piece. She was an Australian painter living in Rome.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the images you used here at the Biennale, which means the Biennial—again, it’s 120 years old, the oldest in the world—and also at the Guggenheim. It was—I remember being there, seeing this just breathtaking display.
EMILY JACIR: Thank you. What I intended to do was, I wanted it to function like you were walking through a film about this man and his life, and my life, except unlike a film, where if you’re watching a film, you’re in a very passive position and almost being lectured to, you were moving among the elements at your own pace. So there was video, and there was sound, various texts, images I had collected from his life, photographs. And it was in—it took place in several rooms, kind of like a maze.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the Guggenheim is a circular building that you walk up.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: The response to this? And how did you know that the Mossad assassinated him, the Israeli intelligence?
EMILY JACIR: Actually, there was a court case. It went to the court case in Italy, and it was proven. And their names are actually—which I don’t have off the top of my head right now—are available in the documents of that court case.
AMY GOODMAN: And finishing this project, what did it mean to you, bringing out this man’s life and death in such a establishment art institution? And it goes to a bigger question about your role as an artist, also as a Palestinian artist, what you’re trying to do.
EMILY JACIR: That’s a huge question.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, a lot of people might be experiencing or looking at what’s going on in the world today, so many conflicts, from Ferguson to Palestine. Here we are in Venice at an art exhibition.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Here you are. How does that mesh? How did you choose art as a way of expressing yourself? And do you consider yourself an activist?
EMILY JACIR: I do consider myself an activist, but I do also feel that when I’m working with my projects, many of them are very long-term and require a lot of research. And actually, it’s kind of the opposite of what journalism is about, because it’s about going really slow and taking your time, looking at tiny details that would not actually normally appear in news reports or news stories or all these—especially all these stories coming out the way the West Bank and Gaza and Palestine is contextualized in the media.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to your third project that I wanted to talk about: the tent.
EMILY JACIR: Oh, the memorial to 418 villages, yes, destroyed, depopulated and occupied by Israel in 1948.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you did.
EMILY JACIR: I was in New York at the time, and I got a family-size refugee tent. It really was a community-based project which took place over a three-month period. And I stenciled the names of every village that was destroyed or depopulated or occupied in 1948 onto this tent, and then invited people to come sew with me, sew each name, embroider each name into this tent. And—
AMY GOODMAN: And where did you get the names of the villages?
EMILY JACIR: The villages’ names, I used Walid Khalidi’s book, All That Remains, which is—and we actually, when we would work on the tent, when someone would start sewing a new village, we would actually read in the book what he wrote about that village, who lived there before, how it was depopulated, etc.
AMY GOODMAN: And Walid is the father [correction: cousin] of the Columbia University professor—
EMILY JACIR: Yes, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —Rashid Khalidi?
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, you had these names.
EMILY JACIR: Yes. And it became—it really became—it really became a social space where people came to gather and sew and work, but the other thing that was happening at that time when we were working on that piece was the Second Intifada had started. So, for many of the community, they were on Skype or trying to call family members. You would get on a subway train in the morning, and there would be these horrible headlines, and you just didn’t feel safe. So, even though we were sewing these names from what happened in ’48, we were also gathering in a space where we could be together to deal with what was happening in the contemporary moment. And that was really important.
AMY GOODMAN: And you left space on the front of the tent?
EMILY JACIR: I left space on the front, because I think the destruction of Palestine is a work in progress that’s still going on, so to imply that I would be adding more names later. So there’s one panel that’s completely empty.
AMY GOODMAN: And then there’s "ex libris."
EMILY JACIR: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain where the installation of "ex libris" was shown.
EMILY JACIR: "Ex libris" was made for dOCUMENTA(13). dOCUMENTA(13) is a big art exhibition that happens every five years in Kassel, in Germany, which is an incredible site because it’s in the region of Hesse, which is where the biggest book repatriation project in history ever took place, when it was under the American zone. And I was very fascinated by this idea of repatriation and restitution of property. So it made sense to me that my project would be about the books, which are currently in the Israeli National Library, that were looted from Palestinian homes and institutions in 1948.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain.
EMILY JACIR: So, I went to the library—well, first of all, those books are in the Jewish National Library in Hebrew University, and they have a mark, "AP." That’s their catalog number, AP, which stands for "abandoned property." So it’s really interesting because they’re part of the system, but they’re also—what happened to them is signified in this AP designation.
AMY GOODMAN: Abandoned property.
EMILY JACIR: Property. But they were looted. And I went to the library, and I—
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by "looted"?
EMILY JACIR: They were taken from people’s homes and institutions and libraries. They were looted. They were stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: Does the Israeli government recognize this?
EMILY JACIR: No.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s in the library.
EMILY JACIR: It’s in the library, under AP.
AMY GOODMAN: Abandoned property.
EMILY JACIR: Property, yeah. So I went, and I took photographs of the traces of the original owners, which I found in the books. So that’s what the installation is comprised of—notes, flowers, an inscription, somebody’s prayer card.
AMY GOODMAN: What do—for example, what would the prayer card look like?
EMILY JACIR: Well, there was one that was a picture of Jesus, like a little bookmark, you know, these little—yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: So a picture of Jesus—
EMILY JACIR: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —in an Arabic book.
EMILY JACIR: Yes, yeah. I found—and then I found a note or pressed flowers. There were—yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the response to this project.
EMILY JACIR: This was really—oh, there was another element of the project, actually, I forgot to mention, which is that I took some of these inscriptions, and I—because I wanted this idea of the public and a collective to be an important part of this. And you know when you write an inspection in a book, it’s so small, and it’s so personal. So I took a couple of them, and I turned them into large-scale murals so they would be out in public space. One of them is actually—I put, a few years later, up in New York, and I think it’s still up. You can see it from the High Line.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what the High Line—not really a banner. It’s a—
EMILY JACIR: It’s a painted mural on the wall above my gallery.
AMY GOODMAN: A mural. And what does it say?
EMILY JACIR: It’s—oh, God, I have to remember which one that was.
AMY GOODMAN: About owning a book?
EMILY JACIR: Yeah, it was "This book belongs to its owner, Fathallah Saad, and he bought it with his own money in March 1892," I think it is.
AMY GOODMAN: And that was the kind of inscription.
EMILY JACIR: That was—he wrote it in the book, yeah. So I translated it into English, and then we have it in English and Arabic there on the High—
AMY GOODMAN: And it’s remained there for years?
EMILY JACIR: It’s still there. I think it’s still there.
AMY GOODMAN: For those who walk the High Line.
EMILY JACIR: Yeah, for those who—
AMY GOODMAN: Your next project, Emily, as we wrap up?
EMILY JACIR: I’m doing a couple of projects right now. Two are films that will be filmed here in Italy, and a set of drawings, and again, back to the subject of translation and naming, and what gets lost in a translation or gained in a translation, and who gets to name things.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us.
EMILY JACIR: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Emily Jacir is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker, professor at the International Academy of Art, Palestine, in Ramallah. Her work includes a diverse range of media, strategies, including film, photography, installation, performance, video. In 2007, she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale here. And in 2008, she won the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum. We will continue to follow her work over the years.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, Mariam Ghani joins us. She’s a Brooklyn, New York, artist from Afghanistan. She takes on, in her art, everything from Ferguson to brutality in U.S.-run prisons, from Guantánamo to Afghanistan, her home country. She is the daughter of the current Afghanistan president, Ashraf Ghani. Stay with us.
Artist Mariam Ghani, Daughter of Afghan President, Takes on U.S. Abuse from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib
We are on the road in Venice, Italy, the site of the Venice Biennale, the oldest and most prestigious international biennial art exhibition in the world. We are broadcasting from the Creative Time Summit here at the Venice Biennale, which on Tuesday featured a public discussion between Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his daughter, the acclaimed artist Mariam Ghani, who is based in Brooklyn. She joins us to discuss how she has worked for the past decade on a number of art projects looking at how the United States responded to the Sept. 11 attacks. Along with the artist Chitra Ganesh, Ghani created an "Index of the Disappeared" — a physical archive documenting post-9/11 detentions, deportations and renditions. Ghani and Ganesh also created "The Guantanamo Effect" — an interactive digital archive defining, illustrating and linking key terms and events in the so-called global war on terror.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Venice, Italy, the site of the Venice Biennale, the oldest, most prestigious international biennial art exhibition in the world. It’s 120 years old. We’re broadcasting from the Creative Time Summit here in the Arsenale. It’s an area of Venice. Yes, the old arsenal. On Tuesday, the summit featured a public discussion between Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his daughter, the acclaimed artist Mariam Ghani, who is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Well, Mariam Ghani joins us today. For over a decade, she has worked on a number of art projects looking at how the United States responded to the September 11th attacks. Along with the artist Chitra Ganesh, Ghani created an "Index of the Disappeared," a physical archive documenting post-9/11 detentions, deportations and renditions. Ghani and Ganesh also created "The Guantanamo Effect," an interactive digital archive defining, illustrating and linking key terms and events in the so-called global war on terror. Mariam Ghani is also a member of Gulf Labor Working Group.
Mariam, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us.
MARIAM GHANI: It’s really my pleasure, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It was quite a scene yesterday here. Now, everyone appears in person, but I understand that the reason your co-panelist wasn’t also here is—well, you can tell us.
MARIAM GHANI: Well, it’s a bit difficult for him to come to Venice without also bringing a whole infrastructure of security personnel with him, which would have quite changed the character of the Creative Time Summit, I think.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re talking of course about the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, Mariam’s father. But your focus in talking with him at an art biennial?
MARIAM GHANI: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Why the president of Afghanistan and you talking about art?
MARIAM GHANI: Well, as I said before—and actually we talked about this during our conversation—art is a really powerful space in which to both recover forgotten histories and to imagine possible futures, that don’t resemble the present as we know it. And I think both of those things are incredibly important to Afghanistan today. And I think Afghanistan’s artists should be encouraged to play that role and to play it to a much greater extent than they have so far.
AMY GOODMAN: So let’s talk about the kind of work you’ve been involved with. I’d like to start with "The Guantanamo Effect." Explain what you’re doing.
MARIAM GHANI: Well, "Index of the Disappeared," my collaboration with Chitra Ganesh, has been running for 11 years. And it’s both a physical archive, as you mentioned, of detentions, deportations, renditions and redactions, and also a platform for related interventions around ideas and issues that are contained in the documents that we archive. We do visual interventions, and we also organize discussions and public dialogues. We have been archiving declassified documents, first-person testimony, other artists’ projects and all kinds of other material around these issues for a long time now. And in the course of that archival project, we have acquired a lot of kind of arcane expertise in a number of different things.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, you are linking what happens in U.S. prisons—
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —with what happens in U.S.-run prisons—
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —abroad.
MARIAM GHANI: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Whether we’re talking Guantánamo or Afghanistan.
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you found.
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah, "The Guantanamo Effect," the interactive project we made for Creative Time Reports, grew out of this phenomenon that we noticed in the course of archiving for "Index of the Disappeared," which is that both ideas, policies and personnel circulated among all the different U.S.-run prisons in the world. So, first you have U.S. corrections officers and U.S. policemen who are deployed as military, military police to Afghanistan when they’re called up in the National Guard reserves. So they end up in Abu Ghraib, they end up in Bagram, they end up in other temporary holding facilities that are prisons in forward operating bases in all of these theaters of war.
AMY GOODMAN: You had, for example, Charles Graner, who ultimately went to jail, the guard at Abu Ghraib, who was known for his brutality in Pennsylvania prisons.
MARIAM GHANI: Exactly, yeah. Their records were not examined before they were put in these positions with vulnerable detainees.
AMY GOODMAN: And he’s the famous one who took pictures with—
MARIAM GHANI: Exactly, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —tortured prisoners.
MARIAM GHANI: You have the well-known incident at Bagram in 2002 when two detainees died, and they died specifically as a result of what are called peroneal strikes, which is a technique that’s taught to U.S. police departments to subdue prisoners who are resisting arrest. It’s a strike that’s applied with the point of the elbow. It’s supposed to be applied only to the thighs. But in the case of the prisoners at Bagram—Dilawar and Habibullah—the peroneal strikes were applied to their entire bodies, and they were applied not when the prisoners were in motion resisting arrest, but when they were actually suspended in a hanging position and left there for more than 24 hours, which caused blood clots to circulate through their bodies and led them to die of stroke.
AMY GOODMAN: Dilawar was a taxi driver who the U.S. authorities imprisoned—
MARIAM GHANI: Mm-hmm, on false evidence, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And killed.
MARIAM GHANI: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And, I mean, how many times was his body hit?
MARIAM GHANI: His body was hit over a hundred times. And this was revealed in an internal Army investigation. The MPs involved, the military police involved in the incident themselves testified in the internal Army investigation that they hit him just to hear him cry "Allah!" because they thought it was funny. So that’s why they kept hitting him.
AMY GOODMAN: Repeat that, please.
MARIAM GHANI: They said, "We hit him just to hear him cry 'Allah! Allah!' because it’s so funny. It was so funny when he did it."
AMY GOODMAN: I remember the descriptions of his body, of his muscles.
MARIAM GHANI: There were bruises all over his body, but especially all along his thighs and his torso.
AMY GOODMAN: His muscles shredded by these beatings.
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah. The internal muscles were shredded when they did the autopsy, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And this practice coming from U.S.—
MARIAM GHANI: It came from, yeah, a technique that was taught in U.S. police departments, although it was misapplied. It was applied in a way I don’t think it was ever intended to be applied. But it’s typical of the way that these techniques and personnel circulated into these other theaters of war and then were—I don’t want to say refined, but were transformed into something else, and then those same personnel then circulated to other theaters, so actually the same regiment of MPs who were at Bagram then were transferred to Abu Ghraib without, you know, any—this is basically before the investigation at Bagram was completed. The regiment was transferred to Abu Ghraib. And, you know, these policies, without really being examined or controlled, continue to kind of mushroom and develop. And ultimately, what happens is that the policies, the techniques, and now even the equipment, the military equipment, circulate back into the U.S., into our domestic sphere.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the issue of accountability? You’re not only an Afghan woman, you’re the daughter of the president of Afghanistan.
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah, mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: The issue of accountability?
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, if you beat someone to death like this—
MARIAM GHANI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —of course, you’d be—you’re supposed to be charged with murder.
MARIAM GHANI: Yes, that’s very true. And one of the problems with that kind of accountability in these military theaters of war—and "theater," I think, is a good term to use when talking about them—is that often they’re structured by diplomatic agreements concerning the territory on which these prisons are set up. Often the prisons are taken over from prisons that were previously operated by the very regimes which the U.S. has taken—has placed the intervention to topple, to replace, and then they actually take over the same prison that was used by that previous regime, without thinking through the implications of using that kind of space and all of its ghosts, you know, which come back and haunt those halls and basically create these repetitions of the same practices. We saw this in Abu Ghraib, which was one of the prisons of the previous regime in Iraq, and we saw this in Pul-e-Charkhi in Afghanistan, which was one of the most notorious prisons of the communist regime. But the diplomatic agreements basically structure these geographical territories such that there is no accountability in the local space, in the host country, for any acts that are performed on that specifically delineated territory, because it is basically a small sovereign zone of exception to local law.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think this should be changed?
MARIAM GHANI: I think it would be fantastic if it were changed. I think it’s something that will be very difficult to change in places where those agreements are already in place. But it’s certainly something that any countries that are entering into these sorts of agreements in the future should be very careful about, in terms of how they structure those agreements, because you don’t know what exactly you’re going to let yourself in for in the future.
AMY GOODMAN: And then talk about what happens here in the United States.
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah, so we’ve really been seeing this in the last few years, in particular. It’s become extremely visible with the recirculation of military surplus equipment from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into domestic police departments and even into school police departments through the MRAP program. But we saw this extremely visibly in Ferguson, in Missouri, the use of riot—riot gear that actually came from the military surplus equipment and created these extraordinarily shocking images that looked like war in a domestic space, that looked like a foreign war in a domestic space.
But there are much less visible things happening, as well, especially in our prison system in the U.S. And one of the most important ones is the creation of the CMUs, or Communication Management Units, especially in Indiana and Illinois—Marion, Illinois, and Terra Haute, Indiana. So these are basically extreme exemplars of solitary confinement where not only the body is physically confined, but also all communication is diminished and managed to such an extraordinary extent that it is severely limiting to all speech. And it’s intended to limit political speech and political activism and political organizing in prison, and outside prison, as well—it’s often applied to prisoners who were activists in one way or another or who are Muslim. But what it has ended up being used for in many cases is limiting organizing in prison, as well, much the way that ad seg, administrative segregation, or traditional SHUs, solitary housing units, have been used in the California prison system, for example, with the Pelican Bay State case being one of the most significant examples of that.
AMY GOODMAN: And the connection with Pelican Bay?
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah, it’s actually the same lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, Alexis Agathocleous, who is representing the hunger strikers at Pelican Bay State in their case against the excessive use of solitary confinement and the political use of solitary confinement, especially the use of gang classification against people who are political activists to put them into administrative segregation. And he’s also representing most of the plaintiffs in cases against the use of CMUs, both for political activists and for people who have been placed in the CMU just for being Muslim.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to switch gears, Mariam Ghani, to talk about your work in the Gulf Labor Coalition.
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: There are official posters here, you know, part of the Biennale.
MARIAM GHANI: Right, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And I want to show this for our TV-viewing audience, and for our radio listeners, you can go online and see. "Gulf Labor. Who is building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi? Saadiyat Island." It says, "Guggenheim, Louvre, NYU, recruitment fees, wages, collective bargaining."
MARIAM GHANI: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what’s happening and the activism you’re involved with as an artist.
MARIAM GHANI: Well, Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists, writers, scholars, curators, architects and other cultural workers who are organizing to ensure that workers’ rights are respected in the construction of these new cultural institutions in the Gulf. And we’re particularly concentrated on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, where a new cultural zone is being constructed basically from scratch, and it’s also part of a larger real estate development project in which the arts are basically being used as one of the luxury commodities of a luxury development. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s a particular flashpoint.
The other is that it’s one of those rare moments when artists have real leverage, because one of the projects is a Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, which is an institution that collects contemporary art. And they have a mandate to collect, in this case, contemporary art from and about the Middle East region. So, we artists who are part of the producers of this work that is needed to fill this museum felt, at the moment when it was first being discussed, that we had a chance, a chance to use the museum as a kind of lever to create a wider change in the region.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn right now to a quote that we got from the Guggenheim in New York, from Sarah Eaton, director of media and public relations.
MARIAM GHANI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: She wrote, quote, "As you know, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi has been a central focus of the Gulf Labor group along with the Louvre and NYU AD"—that’s Abu Dhabi. "But of the three, the Guggenheim has yet to be built. The way in which the project is talked about has led to the erroneous perception that the Guggenheim is currently being built in Abu Dhabi under harsh conditions which is just not true. It is not under construction. The contractor for the construction has not [been named yet]." Eaton went on to write, "In advance of construction, the Guggenheim has been working closely on the issue with the Tourism Development and Investment Company, which is the developer of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. TDIC has enacted reform on several fronts, including worker accommodation, access to medical coverage, grievance procedures, and retention of passports. The Guggenheim continues to work with TDIC and other authorities and stakeholders inside and outside of the UAE to advance progress on conditions for workers who will build the future museum." Your response to that, Mariam Ghani?
MARIAM GHANI: Well, all of the infrastructure for the entire Saadiyat Island development project is basically already being constructed, so all of the water, all of the electricity, all of the foundations for the buildings are already being constructed. So it’s a bit evasive to say that no construction is being done on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi site. They haven’t contracted the specific contractor for the Gehry design yet, perhaps—although they have put out bids, they just haven’t, you know, selected someone.
AMY GOODMAN: Frank Gehry, the architect.
MARIAM GHANI: Exactly, for their specific star architect building. But there is work being done on the site, so there are workers who are already working.
AMY GOODMAN: And your concern about what’s happening to these workers, whether we’re talking about Guggenheim, Louvre, British Museum, Tate Museum?
MARIAM GHANI: We’re concerned about all the workers in Saadiyat Island. And we’re concerned about all the workers, more generally, in the Gulf who are subjected to the kafala system.
AMY GOODMAN: Which is?
MARIAM GHANI: Which is the system whereby you are bound to a sponsor, where—who basically is in control of your right to stay in the country. And this can be especially problematic for workers who have paid a fee to a middleman recruiter to enter the country and are therefore in a debt when they arrive. They’re already in debt for several thousand dollars when they arrive, and are basically working for the first two years just to pay off that debt. So they are essentially indentured servants, their presence dependent on the grace of their kafala sponsor and the length of their visa, which is generally two years, initially, which is just long enough at current wages to pay off the middleman recruitment debt. It doesn’t seem like a very fair system, as it stands.
We would like to see a real, fair working wage. We would like to see workers truly being given the right to organize. As it stands, most often, if they organize, they are deported. We’ve see this happen over and over again. And we’d like to see these practices that TDIC claims to have put in place, for example, through their EPP, their code of practices for contractors on their site—we’d like to see them actually enforced, because they exist as a code, but they’re not actually enforced.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you in talks with the Guggenheim directly?
MARIAM GHANI: We’re always negotiating, and we’re always open to conversations. We always say a boycott is not the end of the conversation, it’s the beginning.
AMY GOODMAN: So, here your president is—your father is the president of Afghanistan. Have you considered going directly into politics?
MARIAM GHANI: No.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
MARIAM GHANI: I prefer to work through the space of art. I think, for me, it’s more flexible, and it’s more interesting.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to record a conversation with you after about your project in Ferguson, which is fascinating, the film you made about it. And we’ll post it online at democracynow.org.
MARIAM GHANI: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: Mariam Ghani, Afghan-American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Yes, her father is Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. On Tuesday, they took part in a public dialogue with each other here at the Creative Time Summit in Venice. Well, Mariam was here in Venice. President Ghani participated by video stream from Afghanistan.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, well, Secretary of State John Kerry is headed to Cuba to raise the flag on the U.S. Embassy in Cuba Friday. We’ll see what a local artist did to break the trade embargo—well, at least to challenge it. Stay with us.
Headlines:
New Poll: Bernie Sanders Leads Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire
A new opinion poll shows Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has taken his first lead in New Hampshire, home of the nation’s first primary. The poll released shows Sanders has 44 percent support among likely New Hampshire Democratic primary voters, compared to only 37 percent support for Hillary Clinton. This poll follows a series of speaking events where Sanders has drawn record crowds. On Sunday, 28,000 turned out for his speech in Portland, Oregon. It was the largest campaign rally for any candidate this year. A day later, more than 27,000 people attended his event in Los Angeles. Before the speech, the campaign’s new press secretary, Symone Sanders, an African-American criminal justice advocate, spoke about the Black Lives Matter movement and said, "No candidate for president is going to fight harder for criminal justice reform and racial justice issues than Senator Bernie Sanders."
Hillary Clinton Turns Over Private Computer Server to Justice Dept.
In other campaign news, Hillary Clinton is turning over her private computer server she used while serving as secretary of state to the Justice Department. She is also turning over a thumb drive that contains copies of her email. The move is the latest in a series of attempts by Clinton to end the controversy surrounding whether she mishandled any classified material with her private email setup.
Greece and Creditors Reach Preliminary Deal Ahead of ECB Payment
In news from Greece, the government says it has reached a preliminary bailout deal with its international creditors ahead of a $3.5 billion payment to the European Central Bank on August 20. The deal in its current form includes a $95 billion bailout in exchange for harsh austerity measures. It does not include any debt relief. The deal must be passed by the Greek Parliament, the German Parliament and that of other European nations. The European Commission spokesperson spoke Tuesday, echoing caution from European officials who say the text of a final agreement has not yet been reached.
European Commission spokesperson Annika Breidthardt "What we have at the moment is a technical-level agreement reached by the staff of the institutions and the Greek authorities on the ground following the weeks of negotiations. What we don’t have at the moment is a political agreement, and that is what we would need."
Australia Unveils Rolled-Back Greenhouse Gas Reduction Goals
In Australia, Prime Minister Tony Abbott is facing criticism for his proposed greenhouse gas reduction goals, which seek to reduce carbon emissions by at least 26 percent by 2030. This plan rolls back a more ambitious proposal of reducing emissions by 30 percent over the same time period. Abbott’s conservative government also repealed laws last year requiring large companies to pay for carbon emissions. Scientists and environmental groups said the new greenhouse gas reduction plan is "way below" what’s needed to address climate change. Among the many to criticize the plan was Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, who told the Australian broadcaster ABC any proposals that won’t limit the increase of warming to no more than two degrees Celsius threatens his country’s very existence.
Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony de Brum "Anything over two degrees for us is the end of our country. We’ll go underwater when that happens. That’s why we’re saying it’s important for Australia, as our big brother to the south, to take our cause and not to do things that would endanger our very existence."
St. Louis Police Release New Video of Tyrone Harris Pre-Shooting
In news from Ferguson, Missouri, the St. Louis County Police Department has released a video it says shows African-American teenager Tyrone Harris drawing a pistol before he was shot and critically injured by Ferguson police officers Sunday night. The shooting occurred during the ongoing protests over the first anniversary of Michael Brown’s death. Harris has been charged with four counts of assault on law enforcement and is being held on $250,000 bail. His father says Harris did not have a gun.
Ferguson: Armed Militia Oath Keepers Spark Controversy
Meanwhile, the presence of a group of heavily armed white men in Ferguson is sparking controversy. The Oath Keepers consists largely of former and current law enforcement and military personnel who say they are upholding the U.S. Constitution. During the protests, a Ferguson resident spoke about the presence of the Oath Keepers on the streets.
Ferguson resident: "You and people who look like you, white males, have the sovereignty to take advantage of the Second Amendment and walk around with assault rifles, but we can’t even like stand out here and assemble peacefully and exercise our constitutional right to do so without being gassed, maced and arrested."
Arlington TX Police Dept. Fires Cop Who Fatally Shot Christian Taylor
In news from Texas, the Arlington Police Department has fired a white officer who shot and killed an unarmed 19-year-old African-American college student last Friday. The officer, Brad Miller, was still in training when he fatally shot Christian Taylor while responding to an alleged burglary at a car dealership. The Arlington police chief said he is turning over evidence to the district attorney, who will decide whether to present it to a grand jury for a possible criminal indictment of the officer.
Amnesty International Votes to Support Decriminalization of Sex Work
Amnesty International has voted to support a policy calling for the full decriminalization of all aspects of consensual sex work. The vote occurred Tuesday during a biennial meeting in Dublin. Amnesty says the policy shift comes after conducting two years of research that showed decriminalization is the best way to defend sex workers’ human rights. Amnesty International will now turn to lobbying governments to repeal laws that forbid the sale and purchase of sex.
Nigeria: Boko Haram Suspected in Blast That Killed Nearly 50 People
In news from Nigeria, an explosion in a market has killed nearly 50 people Tuesday in the northeastern town of Sabon Gari. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, although the U.S. State Department says the blast occurred in a region that has faced a wave of recent attacks by the militant group Boko Haram.
9 Charged in Multimillion-Dollar Insider Trading Hacking Scheme
Federal prosecutors have unveiled criminal charges against nine people accused of orchestrating a multimillion-dollar insider trading hacking scheme. Authorities say that stock traders partnered with Ukrainian hackers to gain access to financial news releases before publication, allowing them to make insider trades worth millions. New Jersey District Attorney Paul Fishman announced the indictments Tuesday.
District Attorney Paul Fishman: "In two indictments, one returned here in the district of New Jersey and one in the eastern district of New York, charging a total of nine individuals. We allege that the conspirators stole more than 100,000 news releases, traded ahead of more than 800 company releases and made more than $30 million. In addition, the SEC has filed a civil complaint charging those individuals and a host of others with similar trading conduct."
Those indicted include six stock traders and two Ukrainian computer hackers. Five of the defendants were arrested in the United States on Tuesday.
Afghanistan President Calls on Pakistan to Shut Down Taliban Camps
In news from Afghanistan, President Ashraf Ghani has called on the Pakistani government to crack down on Taliban training camps in Pakistan following a wave of deadly attacks in Afghanistan. Explosions outside police and military bases and the Kabul airport left more than 70 people dead over the weekend. Ghani called on Islamabad to take action.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani: "The incidents in the past two months in general, and particularly the incidents of recent days, prove that suicide bomber training centers and bomb-making factories, which are continually used to kill our innocent people, are still active in that country, Pakistan. We want the Pakistani government to take practical action against those circles who are committing rebellious acts against Afghanistan. We want them to stop their rebellious acts."
Yemen: Pro-Houthi Demonstrators Protest U.S.-Backed Airstrikes
In news from Yemen, pro-Houthi demonstrators gathered in the capital city Sana’a Tuesday to protest the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition airstrikes. Hundreds of men marched through streets at an all-male rally, while women gathered for an all-female rally outside the United Nations building. One of the Houthi leaders spoke out at the protest.
Ibrahim al-Obaidi: "Today we came out in rejection of colonialism, in rejection of the siege. We will continue preparation and implementation of strategic options soon."
Harvard Prof. Lawrence Lessig Considers Presidential Run
And Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig has announced he is considering a run for president in order to protest money in politics. He says that if he won the presidency, he would serve only as long as it takes to pass sweeping campaign finance reform. Then he would resign, he says. Lessig says that he will run as a Democratic candidate if he’s able to raise $1 million in small contributions by Labor Day.
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VIDEO: A Year of Protests & Organizing After Unarmed Black Teen Michael Brown Killed by Ferguson Cop
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