Play War: Homemade Recreational Battlefields
24th May 2015
You’re looking at a world of gameplay, of simulated war, fought by an army of paintball enthusiasts who spend their weekends shooting one another with gelatin shells of colored dye. Paintball is an industry of equipment suppliers who rely on amateurs to design and build the playing fields. Typically, a few friends with a Bobcat construct a combat stage by incorporating whatever materials remain on the land from its previous use, and whatever can be salvaged nearby. Old agricultural machines, remnants of fallen buildings, shipping containers, cable spools, loading pallets, railroad ties, junked cars, concrete fittings, PVC pipes, obsolete communication towers: The detritus of an industrial century is pushed to the urban margins to create apocalyptic playgrounds. Collectively, these sites represent a range of military conflicts at home and abroad, past, present and future.
It takes some imagination to read these free-form interpretations of castles, spaceships, and Islamic villages. But for the 9 million players that use them, all that’s needed is the symbolic form, a suggestion of meaning. Over the years, the sites take on new complexities, as buildings are layered with patchwork repairs and surfaces acquire an abstract expressionist patina of exploded pigment. They hold the memories of battles won and lost, testifying to the power of personal narrative. We were here then. That’s where I caught them. Authentic hauntings.