I am using this residency to try to make sense of why I am increasingly drawn to making repetitive, continuous pieces of work, for example filling little books with thousands of tiny stick people to represent the growing numbers of displaced people, drawing each months news on a very long roll of paper and constructing a hopefully miles long umbilical cord made from sustainable rubbish and other discarded and secondhand materials.
We are being told that we are particularly dislocated at the moment because of the Covid pandemic. I feel particularly dislocated because our collective history is being rewritten and we are denied the opportunity to learn from the past, whilst at the same time, the shape of our future and our very existence is extremely precarious and uncertain.
The current tragedy of Afghanistan acutely demonstrates this. I drew the map of Afghanistan above, as part of the continuous drawing of the news, when the US followed by the UK, announced their withdrawal. It is clear that already most of Afghanistan was under Taliban control or contested, with very little land under government control. We had already lost that war. A war that involved our culpability in the mass murder of civilians, torture and other atrocities. We have forgotten these facts, we have forgotten the people who supported us in this war, we have forgotten about the borders that we created and nobody seems to remember that we supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan for decades and then changed sides to fight against them.
Jill Eastland - Artist Activist 