Audio Transcript: Langlands & Bell

Here are Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell talking about their work NGO – the letters ‘NGO’ stand for Non Governmental Organisation. It’s the two-screen digital slide projection in this room:

NB: “In October 2002 we were commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to visit Afghanistan to research a commission called The Aftermath of September 11th and the war in Afghanistan.

BL: When we arrived in Kabul, which was 10 months after the fall of the Taliban, apart from the initial shock of the devastation, what really stunned us was the number of NGOs that we saw.

NB: There were 160 local NGOs and also 120 international ones from the UN.

BL: Everywhere one went one saw evidence of the NGOs working and saw the signs that they put in the streets and in the countryside to advertise their presence. Everybody uses the same type of blue paint and that seems to be inspired by the blue and white colours of the UN and I think people feel it confers a kind of authenticity or respectability on their particular NGO operation.

NB: So we took hundreds of pictures of these signs and made a piece of work which combines the signs with the actual acronyms of the NGOs.

BL: And they often make up words, often quite absurd words like WIN stands for World in Need, or COW which stands for Children of War.

And it was quite a shock to us to discover so many people there from other countries and often the Afghan people would say to us ‘what are all these people doing in this country?’ And of course the Afghans had been in a sense on their own for 23 years – you know, they’d had this long period of Soviet occupation – and then isolation, and it was a very big shock for them as well to find the whole country flooded with visitors from other countries.”