Operation Spin Wam is a Situationist-inspired work
in which a troupe will embed itself throughout Mirumshah
and the fortified villages in the surrounding mountains
with the goal of infiltrating the madrasahs and executing key
Taliban warlords at the summer jirga in the Kyber Agency.
With Operation Spin Wam, I plan to use the monetary constraints
of a Canada Council for the Arts grant—constrained further
by the current government—in a manner invoking both De Stijl
and postminimalist techniques while expanding the tradition
of participatory art practices à la Augusto Boal and Allan Kaprow
to chart the boundaries of guerilla tactics including psy-ops,
intelligence retrieval and propaganda on a budget of $17,500.
Operation Spin Wam will make use of untrained local actors only.
This project follows in the wake of my critically-received piece
There Goes Hugo!, a work inspired by the pamphleteering
of Gianfranco Sanguinetti and Guy Debord, in which, thanks
to the Alberta Creative Development Fund, thousands of flyers
were airdropped on the Venezuelan countryside declaring
the death of Chavez and the resulting coup in Caracas.
The state’s various repeated attempts to squelch the actual
ensuing widespread civil disorder forged a new public
theatre of collective expression, while generating deliverables
towards enhancing the project funder’s fiscal hegemony.
I see this present work with the Waziri tribals as a new approach
to expand the field of production in Canadian art and hope
the Canada Council does too. Thank you for your consideration.
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Originally published in The Incongruous Quarterly, 2010.