The 1,000 Drones - A Participatory Memorial : Joseph DeLappe

The 1,000 Drones - A Participatory Memorial, 2014 & 2017, installation and community engagement

The 1,000 Drones invites the public to create a small scale, papercraft replica of a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator UAV (Unmanned Arial Vehicle) - a drone. Participants are asked to write the name of a civilian drone casualty upon the wings of the aircraft. The 1,000 paper drones created for this installation were made over three months in 2014 by students and volunteers working through the FSU Department of Art. The names for the project are from known civilian casualties from Pakistan and Yemen. The names of civilian drone casualties from our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq does not exist – these victims are noted in this work as “unknown”. A second version of the work was created by volunteers and students for an exhibition at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in California in 2017.

The project is an adaptation of The 1,000 Cranes or “Senbazuru” tradition from Japan. This tradition holds that anyone who folds one thousand cranes will be granted a wish. Since World War II the tradition has been associated with the atomic attacks upon Nagasaki and Hiroshima - the folding of the cranes has become a wish for peace. Through the act of participating in this work of creative remembrance, the intention is for we, as Americans, to recognize and remember those innocents killed in our ongoing Global War on Terror.

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