Drone Roomba

2017 | Dimensions variable | Afghan war rug purchased from Sears.com, plastic scale model of US Miltary Predator drone, iRobot Roomba vacuum, acrylic, vinyl

Shortly after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Afghan rugs makers began incorporating military weaponry motifs such as tanks, missiles and AK47s into traditional hand-knotted rugs. This cultural phenomenon came to be known as war rugs. This practice of making war rugs continues into the present, though after 911 the American invasion of Afghanistan many now include the Twin Towers falling and American drones. In the mid-1990’s war rugs became a hot export commodity, particularly to collectors in the US who where intrigued by their strange and violent provenance (so popular in fact, that you could buy one on Sears.com—such as the one purchased for this piece).

Drone Roomba explores both the striking disparity between mainstream Americans’ abstracted understanding of the war in Afghanistan and the Afghan people’s intimate experience of it and the cyclical nature of American warfare and trauma coming back to the US in the form consumable domestic objects. As Americans continue to outsource warfare to drone technology and coalition armies, Afghans are literally knotting the violence into their everyday domestic objects as a crucial part of their lived experiences. For Drone Roomba, an iRoomba, arguably one of the most inane consumer goods for the home, is fitted with a scale model of a US Military Predator drone and set to continuously vacuum the rug until the battery runs out.