benjamin june

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  I am making a pillow for every suicide attack in Iraq since the U.S. invasion on March 20, 2003.

  Most of us have become disconnected and disenchanted with the war, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and millions displaced. The U.S. has failed to secure Iraq in this war for oil, and it continues with no end in sight. The suicide attacks are but a small aspect of the war, but for me they are the most horrifying because of how personal, psychological and deadly they are. There was never a suicide attack in the country before the U.S. invasion, and to date there have been more than 1,400 separate attacks that have left more than 15,000 people dead. Suicide terrorism in Iraq has become a phenomenon and there have been more attacks there in the last five years, than in all other world conflicts combined.

  There is an obvious contradiction between the softness of the pillows and the brutality of the attacks. I choose to make small pillows, because they are inherently intimate objects, to explore the physical intimacy of the suicide bombers with the people they kill. I’m also interested in the contradiction of chaos and destruction versus fragility and comfort. The attacks and the war are more horrific than we can imagine, and to explore this I needed to make something that is tangible and approachable. The pillows are accessible because they create a safer environment to process this brutality.

  I feel that these memorial pillows are not for the victims or for the attackers; they are for the whole, tragic situation. I am attempting to raise awareness and open a dialogue about the number of deaths from these attacks that I believe our government and military are partially responsible for.

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