Walid Raad: Like many kids around me in Beirut in the '70s and '80s, I collected bullets and shrapnel.
And 20 years later, I had come across Jane's Defense Manual. Every manufacturing country has a distinct color code to mark their bullets. I realized that I had in front of me in my collection an index of all the countries that had manufactured and sold weapons to the Lebanese militias in the past 30 years.
I was always interested with creating a chain from the design, to the manufacturer, to the trade, to the discharge, to the impact, physical and psychological, that these things had. I wanted to produce a notebook that imagined such a chain.
Narrator: This work is titled Let’s be honest, the weather helped.
Walid Raad: At the time I was making this work, I was very interested in this idea of the weather as unpredictable. Who could have predicted the impact of certain bullets. These things are unpredictable—as the weather is. But we know very well that there are very clear and sometimes very obvious reasons for why some of these things happened. It’s interesting that they are time and again presented as if they are inevitable and natural.
Narrator: To hear Raad talk about September 11, go to the keypad and press 2830.