0 minutes, Australia/Italy (2003) | language: English
The filmmaker is fascinated by ethnographic museums, in which jewelry and costumes and artefacts sit alongside elegantly crafted weapons and armoury. These melancholic repositories of culture contain historical and ethno-specific traces of the human impulse to both create beauty and destroy life. "Liberation Range", is a catalogue for a range of ghostly body adornments for the epoch of relentless Perma War. It was created as the filmmaker's country Australia, along with the US and Britain, was in the process of invading Iraq, in what many of us continue to believe to be an unjust and illegal war and occupation. During the days of April 2003 she would construct collages of passive and abused bodies decorated by the latest expensive weaponry, and in the evenings she would watch Big Daddy's highly censored tele-feeds documenting the relentless aerial bombardment of cities with melodic names - Karbalaa, Fallujah, Nasiriyah. Occasionally she would see footage from Al-Jazeera of the dying and wounded, and with sadness and respect she used one of these brutal images in this work, the ultimate model for the new "Liberation Range" of jewellry.