On the morning after the 2008 US presidential elections, I set out for over a month long trip to Afghanistan. The experimental literary press, Les Figues Press, of Los Angeles, acted as my news agency and through my pitch on following women in the US military I was able to attain embed approval to travel to Afghanistan as a journalist.
This journey and my experiences surrounding it are part of the longitudinal performance project First Assignment. First Assignment began when I visited the National Training Center (NTC) for the US military in the Californian desert in January 2008. I was there playing a journalist or “media actor” as part of the simulation “Fake Afghanistan” for the soldiers preparing to deploy. At NTC I met Intelligence officer 1LT Kelly Lavorgna and other women of the Unit I reconnected with in Jalalabad, on their first assignment abroad. Through the experiences of LT Kelly and that of other young female agents, I have been investigating the situation in Afghanistan on this self-assigned first assignment over the last year and a half.
Image: still from “January 19th” video, pictured is LT Kelly Lavorgna (left) and a still from “The Vagabond” by Agnes Varda (right)
Before taking off for Jalalabad last fall I traveled to the University of Nebraska – Omaha to participate in an intensive course in Afghan culture designed for military contractors. There I also gained particular exposure to the military’s counterinsurgency doctrine. In Jalalabad I looked at how the language of counterinsurgency is employed on base. After my embed I spent twelve days in Kabul meeting young female Afghan journalists and visiting a number of public and private institutions and NGO’s run and/or staffed by women throughout the city. Interviewing these women on how they develop stories and articulate the sociopolitical issues in their communities brought perspective to my experience as an embed. This September, over Labor Day weekend, I followed-up with LT Lavorgna and others with the military unit I have now seen in training and mid-deployment as they have since redeployed back to Fort Hood, Texas. On this, my first assignment, I am interested in how counterinsurgency not only has combat underpinnings but infrastructure responsibilities, and how the ideology it projects can be visible both as a modeling mechanism for leadership within the US military and for the communities it is designed to protect.
I have produced short video, writing, performance, and installation art as part of First Assignment. As a longitudinal performance project, First Assignment is expressively resistant to summation and, thereby, metonymic of the situation I have encountered through my travel and research thus far. Ultimately, by using the personal as a mode of investigation in traveling to Afghanistan and elsewhere as “media”, First Assignment, straddles documentary and performance, the political and abstract. As an artist, this is the most ethical representation of the complexity of the situation in Afghanistan I can hope to offer.
