Thebes: emerging 3-d work

After watching Bitter lake I was struck by the amount of decaying architecture there was left in Afganistan and how these destroyed buildings could describe the violent and political influences of the country that led to the civil war. Two examples where this is very apparent is the Darul Aman Palace and the soviet culture centre in Kabul. Darul Aman is a destroyed palace built in the 1920s by King Amanullah Khan it was built in the european style and was a symbol of the attempted modernisation of Afghanistan.

The fact that the ruins of this Palace in Kabul were still standing in Kabul was very poignant as the catalyst for the conflict in Afghanistan was the attempts to modernise the country, especially through the effort of the west starting with the three Afghan-Anglo wars, that was followed by the Americans through their building of dams that shifted economics causing friction between villages. I felt this palace could be a symbol in my set of the harmful and destructive influence of the west on Afghanistan the fact that this European palace is now hollow and scarred by bullets can be a metaphor for the failed ideology of a westernised modern Afghanistan that was rejected by the country in a violent manner. I wanted the play to be surrounded by the ruins of their politics to show what Eurydice is trying to build from.

However the west was not the only destructive source in Afghanistan. After it seemed as if the then current communist Afghans society was failing Russia stepped in and took over the country choosing the countries political leader again they were trying to impose their own culture onto Afghanistan there was a revolution which again caused extreme fighting. the soviet culture centre in Kabul is again a symbol of an ideology that has destroyed Afghanistans own culture but it is ultimately hollow and has left the country in tatters At first I thought I would have to choose between these two settings, so I began making seperate card models of the two places in 1:50. However even though i liked the imagery of both places I did not want it to be an exact replica of an existing world, I wanted a more apocalyptic sense.

After my tutorial however it became apparent that combining the two settings could give a true sense of the amount of different reasons for the war. Also it suggests there are similarities between the two situations, both outsiders societies collapsed in Afghanistan. Also having a juxtaposition of the curved classical european style and the boxy harsh 80’s soviet architecture would be very interesting.