South Sudanese refugee producer, filmmaker community activist and co-producer of Bidi Bidi Media Lab. His work explores conflict and statelessness in northward Uganda’s refugee archipelago.

 is a product of a cultural research expedition. In May 2021, 

 project’s team of explorers, documentarians, and artists from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan carried out an expedition from the source to the mouth of the Chu river. The expedition was a part of Adamdar/CA's eco-cultural project 

The group traversed over 2,500 kilometers along the winding Chu river, from the source beneath the glaciers in the Naryn region of the Kyrgyz Republic to its mouth in the steppes of Kazakhstan’s Jambyl province. The group gathered many stories about the river, its meaning, its past, present and the future. Some of these stories made it into the documentary film 

, the film premiered in June 2021 at the annual festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Recitation from an excerpt of “Manas”, “Ilgeri-Ilgeri” by ZERE, “Sululyq” by Nasiafromasia (written by Kazybek Spanov, JCS), “Bir án salam” by Qonyratbay Fam

 and may not be republished without expressed consent.

JerSu

River of Nomads

Inspired by the fragility of natural world and the desire to push the limits of interdisciplinary performance, 

 is the brainchild of choreographer Michael Spencer Phillips and architect Dino Kiratzidis. Following the pandemic, the co-producers set off for northern California's majestic redwood and sequoia forests to create an immersive multi-channel performance installation that juxtaposes the grandeur of the ancient groves against the increasing of naturally-occurring wildfires in scenes that are at once sumptuous, prophetic and troubling. 

Phillips' choreography and Kiratzidis' attention to detail leaves the audience with the impression that the film to unfolds in a single movement, like one long breath. 

 is neither a documentary nor performance art, but a visual stimulant that draws us into its nook, shares its stories in whispers and acknowledges our sorrow.

 features music composed and arranged by Polina Nazaykinskaya for all ballet sequences. Immersive soundscapes were created by Darian Donovan Thomas.

The Anthropocene

Megaflora

Seventeen years after the end of the U.S. Secret War in Laos (1964-1973), I was born in a beautiful, beguiling land littered with war trash. Millions upon millions of tons of unexploded cluster bombs were buried beneath the soil of my childhood. When I was around 10 years old, I asked my father permission to show a few friends the bomb that was wedged between two boulders at the foot of the mountain near our house. I didn’t wait for him to answer, and we were already on our way when my father realized what was happening and yelled out that I should stay away. It was too late. I’d been boasting about it to my friends for a while, and I wasn’t about to lose face, especially given that we’d each sworn an oath not to poke it.

The unveiling was a little disappointing; it looked like any old, dead, rusty bomb. Still, we were terrified because no one knew if just being near it would cause it to detonate. It goes without saying that we survived, but that was not a foregone conclusion at the time, as my father knew well. That bomb must have been there for more than thirty years when I took my friends to see it in 2000, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still wedged between those rocks today.

To exist within an environment riddled with unexploded ordnance (UXOs) requires at least a modicum of cognitive dissonance. Over time, the detritus of war—bombs, missiles, landmines, downed aircraft—gradually underwent a phase of transmogrification, evolving into menacing, lifeless, invasive species that were subsumed by the natural ecosystem. The jungle devoured some, the rivers others, and the farmlands the rest. But they were never digested. Three generations of Laotians have been raised within this “contaminated” ecosystem. In the most heavily-bombed regions of Laos the prevailing sentiment is that the most effective way to quiet your fears is to act like there is nothing to fear. It may seem preposterous to outsiders, but only when a new field needs to be plowed or farmland reclaimed from the jungle do villagers generally report UXOs to bomb clearance teams.

I grew up at a time when mass media was nonexistent and there was very little information about UXOs. I remember representatives from UXO Laos coming to my school on a few occasions as part of a campaign to educate rural children about the risks of unexploded bombs. The UXO Laos agents played games with us and performed puppet shows that taught us not to touch cluster munitions (“bomblets”) and to immediately tell an adult if we spotted one. It was an excellent effort by the government, undermined by the isolation and poverty of postwar Laos.

Economic desperation, an abundance of a raw material, and few other options provided an ideal setting for bomb harvesting to take root near the Ho Chi Minh trail in the 1970s and ’80s. There was little commerce and almost no industry in Laos at the time; very few people were wage-earners. The vast majority cultivated rice, raised a few cattle or buffalo, hunted wild game, and occasionally foraged for fruit or tubers in the forest. Scrap metal, on the other hand, sold for around 1,000 kip ($.10 USD) per kilo. A large haul of cluster bombs could be worth the equivalent of what a poor farmer might earn in a decade, given that the per capita income of Laos hovered around US$300 throughout the 1980s and ’90s. It was little wonder that a scavenging industry emerged in the area most heavily-bombed during the Secret War. Few could have predicted that a Ho Chi Minh Trail gold rush would change the trajectory of so many thousands of lives—a few for the better, far more for the worse.

Harvesting unexploded ordnance is entrepreneurial by nature. First, a cache of bombs or scrap metal must located and carefully removed from the soil or riverbed. The heavy matériel is then transported in bags or by cart back to a workshop, where the munition casing is dismantled and the detonator removed to disarm the bomb. Harvesters then either smelt down the raw material and rework it into products that can be sold to the local community—farm equipment, household goods, or building materials—or sell the scrap metal to Vietnamese merchants who regularly visit town.

The prevalence of this postwar cottage industry is evident in the thousands of villages across central and eastern Laos, where it’s common to see bamboo houses and granaries raised atop eight-foot-tall cluster bomb pillars, metal shells with USAF markings interspersed with bamboo fencing, and vegetables growing out of planter’s boxes welded from shrapnel. Now fifty years after the war, the following series of vignettes paint a portrait of life growing up in Laos surrounded by war trash.

When I was 16, my older brother and I accompanied our father on a field project to map a remote corner of Attapeu Province near the borders of Cambodia and Vietnam. The team set up camp in an area of the jungle far from any known human settlements—a place where king cobras, elephants, tigers, clouded leopards, sun bears, and the last rhinos in Laos still roamed a largely-undisturbed natural habitat. As the weeks passed and the animals became familiar with our presence, we burned clusters of dried bamboo at night to ward off any marauding predators. When heated, the pressure builds in the cavity of the bamboo shaft until it explodes like a pile of firecrackers.

One afternoon after having just finished lunch, a huge explosion about 300-400 meters away from camp jolted everyone to their feet. We cautiously went to investigate what happened and discovered that we had dug our fire pit right on top of an unexploded cluster bomb and the heat from the smoldering fire had evidently triggered the detonator.

Three months later, as we were wrapping up the project, we set off to survey an unmapped mountain nearby. We all descended into a deep gorge, waded across a shallow river, and climbed up the slope on the other side. When I reached the ledge near the summit I froze before a sight I will never forget. I have never felt fear like that in my life. The entire mountaintop was carpeted in bomblets and cluster bomb shells. We would have to tip-toe through the mine field to accomplish our task. Fortunately, the mountaintop was exposed rock, devoid of trees or soil, and most of the bombs were wedged in crevices that we could easily avoid. There was a local guide-labourer with us and I remember him marvelling at the scene, remarking that he could earn good money harvesting the metal. He suggested that we take some small pieces home to use as ash trays or serving bowls for

Keo Ou Don (Don) grew up in Khammouane Province, not far from my village. When she was 10 years old, she and a group of friends decided to scour the jungle in search of an aircraft rumored to have crashed nearby during the war. They carried with them spades, shovels, and a couple empty 50 kilogram rice sacks. Nearly frozen with fear, young Don summoned the courage to follow the other children down a shady forest path. All the while she thought of her older brother who lost his life when the yellow (BLU-3) “pineapple” bomb he was trying to fashion into a lamp detonated in his hands. He died before Don was born. Her mother told her that her brother survived the initial explosion, only to succumb to his injuries a few days later.

Don comes from a family of bomb hunters. Three other relatives died when they inadvertently triggered an entire cluster bomb they were trying to crack open. She marvels how times changed. “Back in the 1980s, people were very poor and nearly every household had at least someone involved in the trade.” Scrap metal was hard currency that could be traded for buffalos, bicycles, radios, watches, or other commodities. Don shakes her head in disbelief: “A buffalo back in those days cost the equivalent of a bicycle or a radio!”

The most money Don ever made was 50 kip, which was a fortune for a kid her age, and it had taken her several days to find those bombs. “I only collected bombs that were already exposed and cracked open. It was very difficult carrying the heavy load on my little back, but the money was worth it.” In time, she learned how to “safely” crack open the bombs from some of the older hands in the village whom she trusted.

. “That was what I thought back then. But I’m glad that I’m still here today.” Don did what most other kids did with the steel pellets, she used them as projectiles for her slingshot. “They are such fancy bullets. Perfect for bird hunting or shooing away buffaloes when they get into your rice paddy.”

Somsanouk’s parents moved to the sleepy riverside town of Thakhek from the bustling capital Vientiane when he was six years old. The family settled in Ban Goot (Village of Cripples), named in honor of the soldiers and peasant victims maimed during the relentless bombing campaign and from UXO explosions. The war left many without limbs, while the UXOs left others blind. It was a village of half-broken bodies where it was not uncommon to see residents with missing legs walking around on handmade, scrap metal prosthetics or children collecting water from the well with buckets made from bombshells.

“As a kid, I made a toy gun out of an old missile I found near our house. I used to play war games with it in the temple yard,” remembers Somsanouk. “While we were all running around, hiding from a friend, I noticed some old bombs rusting away behind the temple grounds. I honestly didn’t feel any fear because it was normal to see them. I knew if I didn’t kick it or light a fire near it, I’d be fine.” He shakes his head at the memory. “At the time, I was only afraid that my friend would find me.”

Years later, while on site for a planned infrastructure project in Boualapha district (the second most bombed area in Laos), Somsanouk was walking through a bamboo forest when he came across a field of bomblets scattered across the jungle floor and instantly stopped in his tracks. He looked down and realized that he was standing on an unexploded cluster bomb. One, perhaps two, more steps and the last thing he would have felt was searing heat exploding from the soil and his body rising from the earth.

On another occasion, not far from Boualapha, Somsanouk and his team were surveying a trail that would be used to install high electrical transmission lines. Aware that they were working in an area known to be dense with UXOs, they waited for a clearance team to arrive. “I made the call to start working a little early because the deadline for our contract was approaching. It was my fault. I thought we could designate the benchmark at the proposed site quickly and save us some time. When the UXO team arrived the next day, they found a UXO right next to the wooden pole we had used as a benchmark. They told us we’d missed hitting the bomb by about 5 centimeters.”

Chanthalavong “Thao” Phet is a renowned bomb metal artist who designs jewelry and handicrafts out of his workshop-gallery in Luang Prabang. Born into a poor family in Xieng Khouang in 1980, his father farmed and made money on the side as a blacksmith. He’d sold machetes and metal tools that he could sell in town for as long as Phet could remember. There was never any talk of artistry; he recycled the war trash—the steel and explosives—strewn about the village and rice paddies into something useful because it was abundant.

As trade normalized over the next decade, the price of raw materials became cheaper and factory-produced metalwork phased Phet’s father out of the market. Not long after, he fell ill. As the months of convalescence stretched into years, Phet’s family slowly sold off their assets—land, cattle, buffaloes—to pay for his father’s medical care. By the time Phet reached 18 years old, the time had come for him to step up and provide for his family. Unsure what to do, he revived his father’s old craft. He picked up a spade, rented a metal detector, and walked into the jungle toward an uncertain fate.

What Phet learned from welding bomb metals as a young man has served him well later in life. back in 2010, Phet sensed that a healthy tourism industry was beginning to take root in Laos and decided to set up a village handicraft collective in Xieng Khouang near the Plain of Jars with a few friends and the support of Helvetas, a Swiss NGO. Seventeen local families have since joined the cooperative, and their products are now sold in the Luang Prabang night market, souvenir shops across Laos, and a handful of international boutiques. Phet’s family earnings have increased by 80 percent since they started the collective 11 years ago, and handicraft production now comprises the main bulk of their income.

Reflecting on his journey, he offers a humbled story of success. “I was lucky to have survived back when I was a farmer. Twice I accidentally hit a UXO buried beneath the soil while I was plowing our rice paddy.” He actually cracked one with his hoe. Fortunately for Phet, both bombs were defunct. He knows it was luck of the draw. “Many of the people I knew in those days eventually lost limbs or died not far from my home.”

Few designers think about risk or responsibility in the way that Emi Weir and Cleménce Pabion do. As co-founders of Ma Té Sai, a Laos-based jewelery and handicrafts cooperative that works with bomb art and fosters partnerships with artisans in rural areas of the country, trust and safety are a requisite part of decision-making.

Weir and Pabion met more than decade ago in Luang Prabang while Pabion was “working in development in remote communities” and Weir was visiting the enchanting UNESCO World Heritage site. Sitting on the banks of the Mekong River, they conjured an idea to “source products around Laos to increase the income for rural families by sending the tourist dollar further out from Luang Prabang.” Wait explains, “we select and co-create handmade textiles, homewares, and handicrafts made from bomb scrap metal by people from villages across Laos.” Some MTS-affiliated artists and designers live in rural highland regions, others are lowland farmers or young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who came to the Luang Prabang to find work and develop a marketable skill.

Sengmany is a 30-year-old weaver who has worked with Weir for years. Her story is not dissimilar to others—the money she earns through Ma Té Sai gives her some financial breathing room. “When I got married and moved into my parents-in-law’s house, the [extension] was my contribution to the family, which came from the income I earned weaving.” The opportunity to earn a living back as an artisan has rippled across the Mekong, according to Sengmany, inspiring some women working in Thailand to return home and take part in the budding local industry. One of Ma Té Sai’s lasting legacies will be legitimising and showcasing the work of local artisans. Sengmany’s work, for example, is a known quantity. She sends her products directly to customers and buyers all over the world without fear her designs will be stolen.

The world changes at different speeds and in different ways. There is not one progress. Luang Prabang’s glittering night market is one reality. Another is that tomorrow morning in Khammouane Province, hundreds if not thousands of capable young men and women will wake up in a small village, eat some breakfast, pick up a shovel, a metal detector and an empty 50 kilo sack of rice, and walk into the jungle to test their luck. Weir and Pabion’s work is important because it offers hope and agency to generations of Laotians who grew surrounded by the remnants of war.

Art + War

War Trash

We’re sitting in a neighborhood restaurant hidden at the far end of a long, nondescript alleyway. Huddled around a table near the doorway, everyone glances toward the entrance any time someone passes through it. Our source, who for their safety will remain anonymous, has decided that it’s safer to meet here than at their nearby office. And although the interview lasts close to two and half hours, they never remove their mask. Their work educating and organizing indigenous resistance to land dispossession on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec has resulted in multiple death threats.

Although Oaxaca does not rank among Mexico’s most dangerous states, we have been repeatedly warned that Juchitán is the exception. Aside from the few buildings left crumbling and in disrepair nearly three years after a magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck the region, during the day nothing seems off. But as darkness envelopes the city, meth heads predate the streets robbing people at gunpoint to pay for their habit and cartel-affiliated groups and 

 (assassins) instill widespread fear in an otherwise quiet, traditional town.

Juchitán, a once prosperous regional crossroads, is the linchpin in a “green” land grab engineered and orchestrated by transnational energy producers, private security forces, cartels, corrupt government officials, and coerced local land owners. The story of Juchitán’s transformation from a Zapotec pueblo into a global player in the wind energy market and an important terminus on the first trans-American shipping corridor since the Panama Canal is as complex as it is insidious.

Much of this story begins with the 1994 NAFTA agreement, which triggered a currency crisis in Mexico and set in motion a wave of capital flight that reduced the value of the peso to a fraction of its previous worth. Fearing insolvency and a global economic ripple, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S. provided debt relief which stipulated that Mexico must develop a clean energy sector to help reduce its carbon footprint. Having defaulted on its prior loans, financiers prohibited Mexico from developing its own industry and provided the government with a list of preferred European energy providers.

That same year, seven aero-generators were set up in the areas surrounding Juchitán to test the power and direction of the “Tehuano wind” tunnel. Geologists and engineers brought in to survey the land, mapped out the potential dimensions of the project. Representatives from various European utilities began arriving on the isthmus to assess any obstacles and meet with municipal assemblies to discuss the project and field questions about its potential impacts. Everything was done under the pretense of progress, but it was all just an elaborate façade.

The government had hired anthropologists from left-leaning universities, who had studied local governance systems, to provide detailed reports on the social and cultural elements that might hinder development. Later on it was discovered that the researchers were unwitting actors sent on a reconnaissance mission to provide data that could be used to weaken and undermine the unity and authority of indigenous community assemblies. “If you want to break this society of warriors,” we are told, “you need to break the economic system and deprive people of jobs.”

In the wake of the NAFTA agreement, the term “

became synonymous with a neoliberal corporate agenda that revealed haunting similarities to Spanish colonialism. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, teeming with wind energy potential, found itself in the crosshairs of powerful stakeholders including the International Monetary Fund, corrupt governors, European utilities providers and drug cartels waging a shadow campaign under the banner of a “green revolution.” Criminal elements from Spain and Venezuela with no connection to the land were recruited to protect the wind farms and moonlight as paramilitaries who could coerce vulnerable landowners into leasing their property.

By the mid-2000s, indigenous groups from the mountains, cities and coast had banded together to resist 

 But tensions heightened in 2006 when private security firms began enlisting local allies, who wouldn’t be seen as outsiders or invaders, to help persuade public opinion. Juvenile criminals were recruited from local prisons with the help of lawyers and judges, who expedited their release, in order to essentially form a new cartel with a front line of 

who acted as “guardians of the wind farms.” Drugs started funneling into the city to simultaneously satiate the appetite of criminal elements who were taking over the city and to slowly break the bonds of the Zapotec community. The staggering rates of meth addiction and incessant violence that plague Juchitán today are testament to the underground economies that formed under the far-reaching influence of organized crime.

Security forces employ a mixture of hard and soft power. Agents of energy conglomerates invested in the wind farms, predominantly from Spain, infiltrate communities by developing relationships with local women to sway public opinion while diluting ethnic ancestry and cultural connectivity. The theory holds that Zapotec, Mixe or Ikoots women who are in relationships with outsiders are more likely to reject their communities or indigenous resistance movements and become willing (if unintended) agent provocateurs of corporate interests. The arrangement raises the social status of these young women and secures their employment in the same companies as their foreign partners.

In other cases, seemingly altruistic interlopers offer low-interest loans, often to women, in order to build relationships based first on trust and later on dependency. Those able to repay their loans naturally tend to promote the merits of micro-finance. The majority, however, end up defaulting on their installment payments and find themselves poor and powerless, unable to speak up against the lenders who are financed by corporate entities.

Although the notion of a cabal of transnational corporations, cartels, and government counterparts working in concert to diversify and legitimize criminal dealings into respectable public-facing businesses may seem like too much conspiracy for one theory, the disturbing, gravely unfortunate truth is that it is very real. And they are successfully unraveling the bonds of civil society through the fear and pressure generated by street gangs and paramilitary groups.

It is widely acknowledged that the cabal of power extends to the top, and that the Governor of Oaxaca has a direct connection to the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, a proxy owner of a well-known construction company that receives a significant share of contracts to build the wind parks. One of the more egregious examples of money laundering occurred several years ago when the a construction company linked to the cartels gained permission to build all the OXXO convenience stores in Juchitán, even though there was a moratorium on new petrol stations at the time.

The recruitment of juvenile delinquents and violent prisoners in the years after 2014 led to the formation of street gangs tasked with carrying out low level violence for cartels and corporate interests in Juchitán. This marked the beginning of a particular violence directed at women. Local gangs, who sensed an opportunity for profit in the handmade 

(dresses which cost 15,000-35,000 pesos), filigreed gold necklaces, and earrings worn by Zapotec women during traditional “

 (celebrations), began raiding the elaborate parties. The plunder is then sold to pawn shops, financed by the cartels, and transported elsewhere to disguise the origins of the gold or costumes. The loss of these precious gowns and jewelry creates tremendous financial burdens local on families, who are “obligated” for cultural reasons to replace the stolen goods.

Wind energy producers use a similar technique to appropriate land on the isthmus. Farmers who rent their farmland to wind energy providers soon discover they are no longer able to earn a living wage in Juchitán. Nearly 80 percent of Oaxaca is collective land and propriety ownership is still passed down through the 

 system, which awarded communal ownership rights with government oversight to peasant farmers after the Mexican Revolution. Although the 

 laws were amended in 1994 to facilitate individual land sales, corporate entities find it easier to lease parcels from landowners than to purchase outright due to byzantine legal codes and pride of ownership. Despite the obvious disadvantages, Juchiteco landowners often find themselves outmaneuvered and capitulate—agreeing to predatory land leases that pay meager dividends and over time strip them of their rights to use the land for commercial farming.

 to succeed it must continually seek opportunities to capitalize on the vulnerabilities of traditional governance systems so as to weaken and destroy the democratic safeguards of 

and replicate a neoliberal agenda. The model has been quite effective in selling the promise of unprecedented access to the modern world to communities on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Seeing the potential benefits, municipal assemblies representing previously isolated mountain pueblos negotiated with the government to build a series of commuter railway stations along the 

, which holds a particular appeal to younger generations whose desires extend beyond an agrarian future.

As the plans to complete the Transistmico economic corridor by 2022 are pushed forward, convoluted power structures driven by unquenchable 

are polluting the relationships within and between indigenous communities. Ultimately, the most grievous loss will be the obliteration of ancient languages, cultural practices, and historical sites which hold unquantifiable value in our collective understanding of civilization itself.

Our source wears a t-shirt emblazoned with EZLN (

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional

), an homage to the civil resistance and anti-globalist struggle of the indigenous movement in Chiapas and its leader Subcommandante Marcos (now Galeano). Their work organizing grassroots resistance has made them a target in a systematic campaign to shift responsibility for any violence that may occur on the isthmus away from corporate interests, cartels, and corrupt officials and place the blame on activists, academics, and NGOs. Those engineering the shadow campaign have gone so far as to send doctored reports of malfeasance to our source’s associates in Mexico City and to silence opponents in Juchitán—a dark-hearted modus operandi that has thus far proven effective.

The threat of violence in the region has done little deter to community leaders and activists from their relentless pursuit of equitable, sustainable development of the Isthmus and the preservation of culture and autonomy. Unfortunately, they face a shapeshifting cabal of profiteers and “extractivists” with a limitless capacity for violence. Neither is likely to go down without a fight.

Extractivismo: Oaxaca

Guardians of the Wind

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Total FC Pullover Hoodie

United States

Yunnan

Oaxaca

West Nile, Uganda

La Frontera, US-Mexico Border

Global

Sichuan

Myanmar

East Africa

United Kingdom

Central Asia

North of Ireland

Eelam, Sri Lanka

Euskadi, Spain

Laos

Honduras

Canada

Tibet

Portraiture and landscape photography reveal the sacrifices that migrants, displaced peoples and asylum-seekers are forced to make on the dangerous, desolate journey across the U.S.–Mexico border.

What Remains

Graphic reportage, documentary films and podcasts written and produced by a collective of South Sudanese refugees living in Bidi Bidi Settlement, the world’s first permanent refugee city. 

Bidi Bidi Media Lab

Artistic photojournalism and visual storytelling documenting the impacts of China’s modernization policies on the remote and misunderstood homelands of the Nuosu people of Southwest China. 

The Cold Mountains

Ethnographic research, ecological fieldwork, documentary film and conceptual art coalesce in a ground-breaking visual exploration of modernization vs cultural preservation in Southwest China.

Breathing

Historical reflections and critical perspectives from global conflicts past and present illuminate the process through which trauma is transformed into artistic innovation and revolution.

Reportage + Art + Activism