Now we get into the work-in-progress part of the week, and I should begin by going back to my first post. In 2015, while researching landscapes in Kuwait for Everything, and Nothing, I noticed that Kuwait still hosts a lot of US military bases - at the time it was about fifteen, I think. As I looked into them, they seemed like hastily-built US cities: concrete, cinder block and plywood, with Pizza Huts and Burger Kings. I wanted to photograph them. Over the next ten years I visited Kuwait, the UAE, Afghanistan, and Iraq, as well as bases in the US like Creech and Nellis.
It’s my opinion that a country can’t be at war for decades at a time without that seeping back into domestic culture, and I think today people are just starting to realise how significantly this has affected us. The initial sense of futility in protesting against the Iraq war turned to apathy. Photo editors would tell me that the public wasn’t interested in Afghanistan; the news cycle had moved on. The state of constant war had become background noise; there would be occasional bursts of outrage at how local police departments were receiving MRAPs that had rotated out of service, as “warrior cops” posed proudly in full battle rattle looking like they were about to storm Fallujah again, but there was never any meaningful discussion around these seismic cultural shifts. The events of recent months appear to have shocked America, but all of this was entirely predictable. Now we find ourselves dropping MOABs on Iran, abducting world leaders in the middle of the night, executing protesters in the streets in Minneapolis.
Here are some of the images from the places I mentioned.
We’re talking about Fascism these days as it becomes more visible on the streets. The shocking and visceral ICE debacle has ignited the ire of a lot of folks, but it’s also not new. In the US, police kill 1,000 civilians a year - a number that doesn’t fluctuate much, regardless of who is in power. We also have an uncomfortable track record of torture, both domestically and “downrange”.
I had long wanted to make a project around my Grandfather’s memoirs from the Italian Resistance, and to draw comparisons across thousands of miles and 70 years of history. Were he working today, he would have been labeled a “terrorist” by the state, as Alex Pretti and Renee Good were. And while, unlike them, he was responsible for the end of some 100 Nazis and Fascists, he wasn’t summarily executed in the street by masked goons. He was, however, tortured multiple times, but ultimately survived the war.
The word “terrorist” is heavily loaded. Its invocation instantly neuters most discussion - “you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists”. It allows us to suspend conventional codes of ethics and legality. But once you strip away the layers of pain and fear that the word evokes, what’s left is asymmetric warfare - the need to do more with less. On the other hand, we stand behind a veil of pomp and circumstance in the way we prosecute wars - chains of command, tradition, pageantry; and distance, both physical and emotional.
Calle Tredici Martiri (Alley of the Thirteen Martyrs) is a reinterpretation of Aldo’s campaign against Nazi occupation. The title refers to the location of the Venetian headquarters of the National Republican Guard, which his team destroyed in 1944, killing 13. The following day, the Germans executed 13 Italian prisoners in retribution; after the war, the street was renamed “Calle Tredici Martiri”, to honour the fallen men.
Today, that building is the headquarters of the Venice Biennale, and you can sip a spritz on the Grand Canal with barely any idea of the blood that ran into the waters. So again, this project is about the power of capital and violence. It was truly a joy to work on, not least because Italy takes culture and history so seriously.
Y.W.R.A.A. (You were right all along) followed Knives, and comprises a series of closed loops and inner monologues of characters pictured in Knives, letters unearthed from company archives, and comments posted on web sites. Y.W.R.A.A. can be thought of as connective tissue between several different projects about economic and physical violence, made at a unique historical intersection in the United States as we bear witness to the decline of capitalism, the banality of mass shootings, and mistrust of the institutions that have held the country together. It bakes my noodle a bit to think that this was pre-COVID, pre-January 6, pre-Trump Sequel.
This book marked a turning point in the way I think about the kinds of work I want to make, where I started to improvise and integrate different technologies into the works themselves - so, I’d manipulate data to make a rudimentary image; the device printing the book became an installation, and so on. There were numerous small experiments involving sensors, sound, and light which I would place in the landscape and later recover.
I made 25 copies of this book. The book block consists of images and text rendered as a single ASCII file printed on a continuous sheet of perforated paper, Japanese bound, and accompanied by individual insertions and archival prints. Each image in the book is located using military grid reference, designating sensitive locations like Bagram, Afghanistan; sniper training camps in Utah; the site of the mass killing in Las Vegas; and maximum security prisons.
Hi there. This is Jason Koxvold, and I’ll be posting on @map6collective this week - very grateful to the team at MAP6 for the opportunity to show some work that people haven’t seen yet, and connect the dots between projects spanning the last seventeen years or so.
I’ve been living in the US since just before 9/11 - initially in San Francisco, then New York, and now Portland, OR. My attempts to understand that moment significantly altered my politics and how I experience the US, and its relationship with the rest of the world; becoming an artist gave me a space to explore those ideas.
My first project was called Everything, and Nothing — a study of global capitalism, which Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa described as “the backstage landscapes of neoliberal growth”. I was interested in the visual language of capital, and the inevitable result of exploitation, commodification, and disposability; primarily seeing people as tiny specks struggling to parse their place in a world that was suddenly effortlessly connected, 7 billion of us competing for the same resources as supranational corporations influenced policy in ways that voters could never hope to.
Everything, and Nothing hasn’t yet been published, and was mostly a pre-Instagram deal, so many people haven’t seen that work. It’s where I began, and I’d love to finish it one day.
The last photo in this sequence was made in Kuwait and researching it opened the door to my next long-term project, Cease Buzzer - which itself was interrupted by the ascension of a reality tv actor and failed businessman to the office of the President. Those projects will follow here in the coming days. In the interest of making the trajectory understandable, I’m going to keep it essentially chronological. Let me know if you have any questions!
We’re delighted to have Jason Koxvold as our next Guest Takeover @kox
Jason Koxvold (@kox ) is a Norwegian-Italian artist focusing on the shared spaces between neoliberal economic policy and state violence. He has made work in diverse locations, from Afghanistan to Nigeria, Arctic Russia to South Africa. His work is primarily lens-based, and in recent years has expanded to include sculpture, digital performance, and installation works.
His first monograph, Knives, was published in 2017, followed by You Were Right All Along (2018), Calle Tredici Martiri (2019) and Engage and Destroy (2023). He is also the founder of Gnomic Book (@gnomicbook ), an imprint focused on challenging subjects by emerging artists, and has published over 25 books in this capacity.
Jason has exhibited in solo and group shows in the United States, Britain, France, and Japan. His work has been featured in publications including The British Journal of Photography, Aperture, the Financial Times Magazine, Der Greif, Wired, Le Litteraire, Newsweek, Gestalten, Thisispaper, The Great Leap Sideways, Mother Jones, and Slate.
He currently lives and works in Portland, OR.
RIP to the goat. Robert Wilson was my first commission from @kateelisabee at @wallpapermag . He was an absolute gent. I wish I could have seen more of his work.
This roughly hour-long episode with @kox is extremely dense.
Jason's words quickly take us through the folds of this book's pages, and it's right to speak of folds because it's there, in the points and details not immediately visible, that this work unleashes all its strength.
Engage and Destroy is an honest, simple, and direct documentation of our society of perpetual war.
From @gnomicbook Website:
ENGAGE AND DESTROY is a subset of a long-term investigation into the cultural effects of the perpetual war in which we find ourselves.
Made over the course of sixteen months at Fort Moore, GA, the project is comprised of portraits of male U.S. Army recruits at the beginnings and ends of their basic training cycle, interspersed with imagery of the hand-to-hand combat training which lies at the core of Army doctrine.
Juxtaposed with the deconstructed words of the Soldier's Creed, the images are a meditation on culturally manufactured notions of hegemonic hypermasculinity in a time of global conflict — and how these notions meet with reality in the minds and bodies of the subjects of this work.
On Mon, Jun 2, 2025 at 11:30 AM gabriele chiapparini <[email protected]> wrote:
This roughly hour-long episode with Koxvold is extremely dense. Jason's words quickly take us through the folds of this book's pages, and it's right to speak of folds because it's there, in the points and details not immediately visible, that this work unleashes all its strength. Engage and Destroy is an honest, simple, and direct documentation of our society of perpetual war.
