“These Uniforms Have Been Places.” From Combat to Paper to Exchange: A CMS Research Encounter (original) (raw)

2023, Creative Methods in Military Studies

This chapter explores my encounters with Combat Paper, a US veteran art project transforming military uniforms into handmade paper. Through autoethnographic narrative and intersecting visuals of the papermaking process from the places of these encounters, the chapter delineates my experiences of papermaking from military uniforms by/with US veteran artists. In Chicago, as part of Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal’s project Conflict Exchange (CX) where the paper made will be sent (back) to replenish the decimated fine art library at the University of Baghdad, I engaged in the first step to ‘liberate the rag’. To feel the politics of tearing/cutting up a uniform as non-military researcher; finding sand in the pocket; knowing, as Combat Paper founder Drew Cameron stated, “These uniforms have been places.” Then in upstate New York with other papermaking artists, to engage in further steps of the process, the rag now beaten pulp, pressed into paper for a new recruit. To feel the politics of this workshop’s art – for Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans Stand with Standing Rock – rub alongside my contribution to this paper as resistance travelling to Iraq on this recruit’s deployment. The places these uniforms have been are therefore multiple, (de)militarised and (de)militarising: home front; imperial elsewhere; military body; veteran hand; artist resource; artwork. Through papermaking, these uniforms therefore move – geographically, physically, materially, emotionally – taking us potentially to creative, political places that unsettle militarised/militarising power dynamics. The chapter then finally explores the ongoing encounters with these encounters: in the self-reflective spaces of their aftermath, with the traces they leave in/on the research(er). To feel the politics of this ongoing exchange, the ethical tensions between myriad bodies. Of sensing on/with/in the researcher’s body how these uniforms now move politically, aesthetically, ethically. Of applying that body (of researcher/research) to communicate the politics, aesthetics, ethics of these encounters, the bodies, (after)lives, affects they encompass.