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On Native Land : Mail Art Story : Death-ball Visits Art Gallery, or, When is the logic of faraway death not faraway enough?

Added on January 16, 2015 by Drittens Cat.

Materials: a large silk lantern, paint, a sacred valley in an occupied nation, a camera, rope, a ladder, a long metal rod, one large home-made corrugated plastic mailing envelope, stamps.

Type: installation + mail art.

In August 2014 The Pinky Show was invited to participate in a mail art exhibition and was told by the curators, "You can send anything, as long as you send it by mail... You can send rocks if you want." Not interested in sending rocks, we decided to send them a large death-ball instead, along with a couple of post cards with an explanation of where our ball comes from and what it represents.

So, what is it? Well, this is a very special death-ball (actually, it's just an inexpensive Japanese lantern that we painted to look like a fearsome death-ball) that Pinky & TC flew for over a month in and around Makua Valley on the Waianae Coast of Oahu, Hawaii. Makua Valley, a sacred valley of profound cultural and genealogical significance to Native Hawaiians, is also known as Makua Military Reservation to the U.S. Military. It's been used for all kinds of training - live-fire training, simulated amphibious assaults, etc. - for over seventy years, ever since the U.S. government seized it at the outset of World War II. They never returned it. After decades of illegitimate occupation, profound disrespect and desecration, and devastating environmental abuse, our ball is now charged with all the symbolic rage it can hold, and maybe even some amount of radioactive contamination. (Who knows? The radioactive half-life of Depleted Uranium is 4.5 billion years...)

We painted a decent-size warning directly on our ball & printed the same on a clearly visible label we affixed to the outside of the ball’s very large see-through envelope:

WARNING.
POSSIBLE RADIOACTIVE CONTAMINATION.
[ BOMB IMAGE ]
THIS OBJECT MAY HAVE BEEN EXPOSED
TO DEPLETED URANIUM AT MAKUA VALLEY (WAIANAE, HAWAII)
A U.S. MILITARY LIVE-FIRE TRAINING AREA

We mailed it to the exhibition folks via the U.S. Postal Service. That was in November. We have not heard from the exhibition people or the mailman. Where's our ball??

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In art-things Tags Hawaii, u.s. imperialism, depleted uranium, native land, colonialism, occupation, art, mail art, installation art
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