The Visual Artists’News Sheet
March – April 2014
23
Art in public - profile
Cause Collective,In Search of the Truth, 2013installation view at the base of the Buddha, which wa dynamited by the Taliban in 2001 in Bamyan, Afghanistan, photo by Jim Ricks
Cause Collective,In Search of the Truth, installation view, Herat, Afghanistan, 2013, photo by Jim Ricks
To Tell The Truth
going. It’s an art piece, on one hand, but it’s also a way to communicate and allow people to connect.
GEORGIA CORCORAN TALKS TO JIM RICKS ABOUT ‘THE TRUTH BOOTH’, A COLLABORATIVE PUBLIC ART PROJECT THAT RECENTLY Toured TO AFGANISTAN.
GC: The trip was documented online the whole time; was this integral to the project? JR: Yes. We kept a blog and updated it as we went along – utilising Twitter, Facebook Instagram, Vines, Vimeo etc. The blog feed was a combination of all those sources. For Pakistan next year we’ll set up a second blog.
Georgia Corcoran: What exactly is ‘The Truth Booth’? Jim Ricks: Simply put, it’s a giant speech-bubble-shaped inflatable video recording booth that’s traveling the world inviting people to finish the sentence, ‘The truth is…’ in two minutes or less. It’s a collaboration between myself, Ryan Alexiev and Hank Willis Thomas. We’re all members of Cause Collective. The collective is a network of people – working in art and in other disciplines – that formed out of a public art commission in Oakland, California that Hank and Ryan couldn’t complete on their own. They started bringing in other professionals who had resources that they could tap into; this became Cause Collective. GC: What were the origins of the project? JR: In 2006, at the Socrates Sculpture Garden in New York, Hank and Ryan presented two inflatable helium balloons – shaped like speech bubbles – that were fixed to the ground by cables. They had ‘The truth is I am you’ written on them – one in Hebrew and one in Arabic – addressing the Israel-Palestine conflict. The first spin-off was at the University of California, San Francisco – a project that included all the languages used on that campus: Mandarin, Tagalog, Braille etc. But they soon realised that in fact ‘the truth’ couldn’t be translated simply and concluded that people should be defining the truth rather than being dictated to. This idea became really essential – bringing the public back into public art. GC: When did you get on board? JR: I met Hank when I was finishing my undergrad at California College of the Arts. I reached out to him regarding a solo show at 126 Gallery in Galway in 2009. We did the show during the Galway Arts Festival and I asked if he would be interested in doing something public. He said, “Yeah, sure; I have this great idea – it’s called ‘The Truth Booth’”. Two years and many Skype conversations later we had a viable plan and I was a member of Cause Collective. GC: How is the project funded? JR: Mission 17, a not-for-profit centre for visual culture in San Francisco, helped with the original planning, then the San Francisco Foundation contributed to touring, the Arts Council of Ireland contributed significantly to the manufacture and the initial tour. Galway Arts Festival also helped. Free Press Unlimited supported the Afghanistan tour. The connection arose from a conversation with a photographer named Antoinette de Jong, who I met in Amsterdam about a year and a half ago. I was doing a talk on ‘The Truth Booth’ at the Unseen Photo Festival and de Jong’s work dealt with Afghanistan, which she thought would be an interesting context for the booth. She later put us in touch with the Dutch organisation Free Press Unlimited, who work in places like Afghanistan, Bolivia, Egypt – all over the world across all continents.
GC: How do you realise a project of this scale? JR: We’re doing this for the first time, which is typical of most things Cause Collective does. Nobody had made a giant inflatable speech bubble video recording booth and toured the world with it before. I guess we made it up as we went along and divided up the tasks. Shipping? How do you do that? What’s the safest way to do that? Free Press Unlimited sorted the security protocols. They hired a team for us and covered hotel costs. Ryan and myself dealt with the artistic concerns like locations and onsite trouble-shooting. The project manager was Antoinette De Jong with Ian MacWilliam working as our regional co-ordinator. Both of them had worked in Afghanistan for years. Our entourage also included Amir Shah, who works for AP there and knew the ropes. He was invaluable: very calm, de-escalating everybody, very down to earth. We had also Fareed from national network 1TV, our translator Mehran, and our camera-woman Melissa. GC: Who fabricated the booth? JR: Inflatable World, the people who invented bouncy castles, made it in Nottingham (UK). They also use the same technology to make tents for the British Ministry of Defence and festivals. I first made contact with them when I was working on my Poulnabrone Bouncy Dolmen artwork. GC: What’s it like working in a country with major security issues? JR: It’s a country that’s been war-torn for over 30 years and has regular suicide bombs, skirmishes in the countryside, kidnappings and other attacks. The presence of razor wire, Kalishnakovs, concrete barricades etc are ubiquitous. We couldn’t go out of the compound in Kabul. We didn’t broadcast where our booth was going to be in advance. We worked closely with an Afghan team from 1TV so that people didn’t feel that it was some kind of weird outside thing being imposed on them – or a CIA thing. GC: How smoothly did the trip play out in the end? JR: By Afghan standards: very well. We got everywhere we wanted to go more or less on time. There were a few glitches. We were going to take it outside of Bamyan, and some foreigners were kidnapped the day before we were going (they were found and were fine). So, that leg got cancelled. It’s the journeys onto country roads where you’re most vulnerable. We didn’t go to Jalalabad, Kandahar, which is higher risk, or anywhere in the South or very remote. GC: Was going to a conflict-zone important for the integrity of the project? JR: Absolutely. Its one thing to tour ‘The Truth Booth’ around familiar places – places where people have an outlet, speak English, some wealth – it’s another thing to take it where the western media are looking for sensational headline stories, where you don’t hear what everyday people are saying on the street. And that’s where we wanted to see it
GC: I’d imagine shipping ‘The Truth Booth’ was a logistical challenge? JR: The inflatable weighs 300 lbs when rolled up; and there was other equipment. It was expensive getting through customs into the US. In Afghanistan an ‘additional fee’ was put on at the end. Initially, we thought about shipping it in a pickup truck but decided not to because the best excuse we could come up with, if we were stopped, was, “It’s a tent”. We realised that in the desert or mountains that might be quite a desirable object. We ended up shipping it on passenger buses wrapped in extra white tarp. Once we actually got a taxi to drive it to Bamyan from Kabul and back. We brought all the other equipment with us on the plane. We flew across the country three times; it’s very mountainous. Kabul airport has eight security points; there were dogs sniffing, people try get bribes from us, and we had a metal pole, one huge fan, a suitcase filled with $4000 in computer equipment, a chair, a curtain, cables, tools, a bag full of metal stakes and a mallet. It was always a challenge. GC: You’re back now, safe and sound. How is post-production and translation coming along? JR: We ended up with 600 videos and maybe 200 really good ones, but weren’t able to broadcast them straight away. Our translator was good for talking to policemen in the park, but not so great at written translations. He just wasn’t an expert at English and he kept falling back on the same phrases. We’re still working on it, doing the videos individually, Dari and Pashto to English. It’s very tricky to find people who are fluent in both. This has been our biggest blind spot. GC: What does the future look like for ‘The Truth Booth’? JR: The inflatable took a beating in Afghanistan; it got a lot of sun, it got scratched. The booth itself might be replaced. I could see us going through various versions. And we need to work on our website. A European tour would make sense, and a North American tour. But it’s really about empowering people, educating people, allowing people who don’t have a voice to be heard. We haven’t even talked about South America or Africa yet. Free Press operates in a lot of places that we’d like to go to. As I mentioned, we’re going to Pakistan in October. Jim Ricks is an artist and member of Cause Collective living in Dublin. Georgia Corcoran is a freelance writer based in Dublin and is a member of Basic Space. www.insearchofthetruth.net www.the-truth-booth.blogspot.ie www.causecollective.com