Antonio Ottomanelli: Kabul + Baghdad

The solo exhibit, set up in the Center’s monumental hallway, shows a selection of works from two of the Italian reporter’s projects: Big Eye Kabul and Mapping Identity. The pictures have been shot in two critical scenarios, Afghanistan and Iraq, and are a testament to the urgent need of keeping a more detached eye on what is happening, in order to put in a renovation effort in places where destruction has long taken hold. In Ottomanelli’s work, urban spaces are king. The artist, an architect by trade, has chosen photography as a way of analysing the territory, not from the point of view of landscape or city planning, but as a way to gauge social dynamics and geopolitical tensions in war zones. The pictures in the exhibit are the result of a painstaking work both in Afghanistan and Iraq and aim to flip the usual interpretation of similar photos on its head. The viewer, bereft of a strict viewing angle, will be following an airship in the sky and moving through the urban sprawl, in a journey to discover and meditate on the causes and consequences of events.

In Kabul, Ottomanelli focused on perspective: BIG EYE KABUL is the result of this paradigm shift, where the eye of the visitor moves from the road to the sky, in pursuit of an American airship.

Joseph Grima says: “In Kandahar City alone there are eight, and at least as many in the rest of the province; they say the insurgents call them frogs because their large eyes never stop staring. In Herat, they call them shameless because they peer indiscriminately at everything and everyone, men and women alike. In Helmand Province they’re often nicknamed Milk Fish: they languidly swim the skies propelled by small fins, and their milk skin stands out brightly against the blue of the sky. In Herat, during the torrid nights of the summer, couples no longer have sex on the rooftops under the stars.

Antonio Ottomanelli photographed in Kabul the American dirigibles that nowadays monitor almost every Afghan city with their electronic sensors. There they call them Big Eyes. Through a series of simple yet unsettling images, the observer becomes the observed, the investigator becomes the investigated. For a split second, the roles are inverted.

The generals love them not only because they cost a fraction of their Predators: they are also convinced that the image of their swollen bodies floating over the city are a deterrent against insurgent actions. Day after day they float over Afghan cities like a sinister fleet of networked panopticons. Only the harshest weather is capable of interrupting their patient vigil. They say that when storms come and their operators are forced to wind them into the bases, they find their textile shells peppered with thousands and thousands of tiny bullet holes”.

In Baghdad the artist worked on the concept of identity: in MAPPING IDENTITY – BAGHDAD, university students have been asked to create a reliable map of the city based only on their memories and experiences. The photographer itself changed, turning from the reporting and creating of evidence to an act of investigation and a way to instigate civil action.

Baghdad has suffered major damage over the course of recent decades. In particular, between March and April 2003, the city was heavily bombed by US forces, which then went on to occupy it following the deposition of Saddam Hussein. Since then, the urban structure has undergone numerous modifications, yet none of these has been systematically surveyed and documented. Indeed, the last official map of Baghdad dates back to 2003, and was drawn up by the American army for military and strategic purposes.

Mapping Identity is an attempt to fill this gap. Produced as part of a workshop with a number of art students from Baghdad University, the work is made up of a series of partial maps traced by the students themselves with Ottomanelli’s encouragement, guiding their topographical reconstruction on the basis of their own direct experience. The result is a series of neighbourhoods entirely redesigned by those who live there and frequent them, in which the black marks denote the pre-war past, and the red ones all that which changed or has been integrated since. Direct, everyday experience is thus grafted onto the abstract body of the map, giving rise to genuine “snapshots of ordinary life, a sort of ‘Giacomettian portrait’, seeing that Baghdad is kept hidden.”