Libretto
Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson
Libretto is a companion work to Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson's forthcoming Opera. The work is built out of phrases and images from an American military language training programme which is given to soldiers prior to their deployment overseas. The programme consists of digital avatars who will tell you how to say things like, "Do not move or the American solider will kill you" and "We are not here to harm anyone" in Chinese, Dari, Farsi, French, Korean, Pastho, Russian, Spanish and Urdu.
The artists have used combinations of these and other phrases to create an 'operatic' narrative, a simple story about a man who gets arrested and interrogated by an occupying military force. Presented as raw source materials and collaged with news media footage from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the work is all the more powerful when we grasp that the libretto being presented to us is the script for a fantasy of world domination.
2012
154 pages, full-colour, softcover, 228 x 156 mm
978-1-907829-05-5
Edition of 100, numbered & signed