Tag Archives: Esam Pasha

Tales of the road with Jeremy Deller

Bathouseproject.org does appear to have been infiltrated. It apparently includes drawings and animations for a proposed bathouse in the UK. Bathouse: environment for bats.

Monday was day 17 of the Creative Time roadtrip. It found Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller, with compadres Sgt. Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha, hanging on the Santa Fe Plaza. Nato Thompson of Creative Time was there to record the day’s events for his blog. Jeremy talked to me and Conrad talked to Esam. We found out that the RV had a little fender bender in Tennessee, explaining in part Jeremy’s wish that they arrive safely in L.A. An angry citizen had approached the group in the morning, and generally reactions in Santa Fe had been mixed, Jeremy said. According to Nato’s blog, Jeremy and Jonathan had gotten into an argument with a “local art critic” at the house of Site Santa Fe director Laura Steward Heon the previous night. Ah, the art world. The rumpus was over whether work like this is art or not. Jonathan, the Platoon sergeant who worked in psyops in Iraq, called this old saw “tiresome.” I agree. And Esam Pasha, incidentally, reported to Conrad and me that when he was translating for the 21st Airborne at the start of the war, the military lacked sufficient body armor, water, even food. “If you don’t have a plan for the soldiers how can you have a plan for the civilians?” Esam asked rhetorically. And he noted, when we were talking about our late mutual friend Steven Vincent, who died in 2005 in Basra, that times became hugely more dangerous in Iraq post-invasion. “Before the invasion there was one Saddam. After the invasion, 1000 Saddams.”

I’ll be adding photos of the car, which reportedly was a car bomb detonated in Baghdad, soon.

Conversations about Iraq continue in Santa Fe

Esam Pasha, an Iraqi on the road with Conversations about Iraq, talked to Ronald Lewis of the House of Dance and Feathers.

On April 7th the Creative Time Project It Is What It Is:  Conversations about Iraq was in New Orleans. Today, April 13th, the participants will be on Santa Fe Plaza from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. conducting conversations and adding to the blog. I interview Jeremy Deller by phone tonight and will be reporting more about this project soon.