Studio Orta

‘Fallujah-Casey’s Pawns’ is a peace intervention for the city of Prague, commissioned and staged for the 11th Prague Quadriennale. This intervention builds upon research the artists Lucy + Jorge Orta have been persuing since 1991, at the out break of the 1st Gulf War and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in June 2004, just five days before the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq. Fallujah-Casey’s Pawns was originally created for the play ‘Fallujah’ written and directed by Jonathan Holmes and performed in London in association with the Institute of Contemporay Arts (May-June 2007). The ongoing Fallujah interventions are visual responses to the current situation in Iraq with a desire to communicate the consequences of the American led invaision to a wider public. The NGO Body Count has estimated that over 34,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2006 alone, 1,8 million have been driven from their homes and over 2 million have fled to other countries and this number is growing everyday. What has happended to the quarter of a million people whose livelihoods, homes and daily routines have been permanently and irrevocably changed through acts of violence in the name of Western democracy? How can we begin to understand the experience of living through an invasion, which transforms an urban environment and its surroundings so dramatically that an entire citizenship becomes a flock of refugees. “The more we hear the Truth, the more - The political manipulation, the media censorship, the desperation of medical staff, the horrors of combat, the voices of the citizens themselves. Orta 2007”