The Casting

The video is edited from conversations I recorded in Texas last year with a young Army sergeant who was waiting to return for his second tour in Iraq. Over several days, he told me two different stories and I chopped them up and braided them together into one. The first story takes place in Bavaria and involves a date with a German girl who s into speed and self-mutilation. The second story takes place outside Baghdad and involves a road-side bomb and a tragic mistake. These two stories, along with bits and pieces from the rest of the interviews, were edited into a script which was given to a group of actors to interpret in a series of silent tableaux. As an installation the work tries to deal with its subject matter in terms of pairs: Interviewee and interviewer, memory and the movies, love and death, routine and accident. Omer Fast