Streets of Afghanistan is a life-sized, art installation that highlights the beauty and soul of Afghanistan while challenging existing stereotypes of the war-torn country. A ground-breaking collaboration of Afghan and Western photographers through life-sized photography that was launched as a pop-up exhibition in public spaces around Afghanistan in 2012. A book documenting the project of the same name, Streets of Afghanistan, was published by Hatherleigh Press in 2013.
photos by Di Zinno and film teaser by Alexandria Bombach
‘Love Letters’ is a street art mural series based upon actual love letters sent to me by a stalker and harasser. The original letters and poems were recreated as a cut-and-paste lettering wheatpaste mural to evoke the emotion of ransom letters, but with the colorful joy of a kids collage project.
Read on their own, they are sweet, joyful notes on the walls. Read with the context of stalking they take a dark, violent turn meant to engage the viewer in a conversation of consent, harassment, and stalking in our public spaces.
Launched in Denver, Colorado at CRUSH Walls in 2019, the first mural ironically sparked harassment from both the original stalker and the male director of CRUSH WALLS street art festival that I was invited to participate in.
The murals have continued in Cisco, Utah in a one-woman ghost town, Rochester, New York, another in Denver before expanding into two murals in Denver and Boulder that wrote a Love Letter to abused and harassed street artists in Denver and recognising the Black women killed by police brutality during the BLM protests of 2020 in Boulder for their StreetWise street festival. In both cases, I was subjected to abuse and harassment from male streetartists. They are the last murals I’ve installed.
Love Letters is intended to expand a national conversation and create awareness around a crime that is often misunderstood and largely ignored but that creates enormous emotional distress for the victim and can often lead to violence.
My stalker, an artist in Chicago, was eventually charged with a felony. I was denied a protection order two times. It was only due to the amount of evidence that my stalker sent to me that I was able to build a case. Due to my willingness to recognize his role as a single father, I allowed him to plead down to a misdemeanor with two years of probation and required therapy. I was advised by the DA not to attend the hearing, which allowed the stalker to plead his case unimpeded and got one year probation and a misdeamor. He immediately began harassing me when the year was up. When I sought a permanent protection order, I was denied. It was deemed too harsh a penalty for him. The system does not protect victims.
*Stalking and harassment:
1 in 6 women and 1 in 17 men are stalked and harassed in the US. The majority of stalkers are known by their victims. It is very difficult to get support from police and stalking and harassment can continue for years unless direct threats or acts of violence occur. If you need help or want to learn more go to RAINN’s website.
Like domestic violence, stalking is a crime of power and control. Stalking is conservatively defined as "a course of conduct directed at a specific person that involves repeated (two or more occasions) visual or physical proximity, nonconsensual communication, or verbal, written, or implied threats, or a combination thereof, that would cause a reasonable person fear."
Stalking behaviors often include persistent patterns of leaving or sending the victim gifts, following the victim, damaging the victim's property, defaming the victim's character, or harassing the victim via the Internet by posting personal information or spreading rumors about the victim.
Cyberstalking IS stalking. Cyberstalking—the use of technology to stalk victims—shares some characteristics with real-life stalking. It involves the pursuit, harassment, or contact of others in an unsolicited fashion initially via the Internet and e-mail. Social media, chat rooms, and the use of GPS technology have increased the ease of cyberstalking and its overlap with ‘real world’ stalking.
Although cyberstalking does not involve physical contact with a victim, it is still a serious crime. Conduct that falls short of the legal definition of stalking may in fact be a precursor to stalking and must be taken seriously. As part of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2005, Congress extended the Federal interstate stalking statute to include cyberstalking
This was created as a collaboration between myself, my daughter, Devon Galpin Clarke, and Mexican artist, Diana Garcia, to create a series of endangered animal drawings to be pasted up around cities as street art to bring the conservation conversation into urban environments and public spaces based on a series of field research trips Devon and I did as Endangered Activism. Devon based the story of the endangered species on the concept of what we lose if we allow extinction to continue and how it has a ripple effect beyond the loss of a single species. We launched the first series of #WhatWeLose in Paris, France together in June 2018 with a city-wide takeover of sixteen walls. Diana teaching Devon the process of pasting. We were invited by the Oxford City Council to paste the series inside the the historic Covered Market a few weeks later, and brought the exhibition home to Colorado with our inclusion at Denver’s CRUSH Walls where we added a black rhino based off our field research in Namibia as a nod to the RiNo art district that hosts CRUSH each year. We expanded the installation to include Devon’s footprint stencil art and my animal road signs to create a multi-media storyline around extinction to takeover the arts district.
The Imago Mundi is considered the oldest surviving world map. It was found in a town called Sippar in Iraq. It dates back to between 700 and 500 BC. It is currently on display at the British Museum in London. The history of quilting may date back as far as 3400 BCE. In Europe, quilting appears to have been introduced by the Crusaders in the 12th Century as functional pieces under armor. One of the earliest decorative works is the Tristan Quilt, made around 1360 in Sicily.
The stitching together of pieces of maps like quilting is something I’ve something I’ve been doing throughout quarantine using my collection of maps as well as my books of poetry, stamps, and old money from my travels. Stitching maps, memories, and dreams together as a way of recreating a borderless world that reminds me of quilts when they are finished. These maps are like reading dreams, or forgotten memories, or history.
‘Terra Incognita’ is a multimedia art installation about brain injury, loss, memory, and reconstruction created out of my personal experience over a two and half year period with back-to-back brain injuries that created a ripple effect of memory loss, loss of identity, depression, and a complete re-imagining of what my future is if I am unable trust my past. The exhibition aims to open the conversation of traumatic brain injuries regardless of cause through a creative immersion outside of the medical setting to spark creative exploration and communication for both survivors and their family and friends. My own experience was caused by two significant incidents of blood clots in the brain, which led to a significant memory loss, changes in language, focus, and even personality, and required a stepping back from my life, career, and my identify as a mountain biker and women’s rights activist in Afghanistan. This exhibition delves into the search for memory, identify, and recovery through my lens as an explorer and the imagery overlap of brain anatomy with nature and maps combined with the the philosophy and literature of Proust and Lewis Carroll.
During the search for a year of missing memories after two separate brain injuries I was writing memories, trolling my own instagram account, and meditating. I was constantly writing down thoughts, memories, and ideas for projects, as well as my own daily reflections in an effort not to lose them again. I became fascinated by the different weight, color, texture, length, and thickness that I associated with memories as I recovered them and wrote them down… which led me to the desire to write them onto different ribbons. Wanting to stretch my own vulnerability and begin to give voice to the memories that I had lost and found, I started hanging them around Paris. Confronting and surprising passerbys with memories of beauty, tragedy, anger, and love.
I evolved this into a memory project for the death of my mother on the anniversary of her death in an aspen grove. Using quotes she had written down throughout the course of my life in a book journal, I wrote them onto ribbons in her favorite colors and hung the in an aspen grove. I took them down six months later on my birthday.
