CCM 13MSP Presidency on the Convention 15th Anniversary and Announcement of the 2025 Y4HD Contest Winner
On 1 August, Convention on Cluster Munitions 13MSP President Carlos D. Sorreta – Permanent Representative of Philippines to the United Nations Office at Geneva – speaks on the significance of the Convention’s 15th anniversary, and announces the winner of the 2025 Youth for Humanitarian Disarmament Contest.
Congratulations to Martina MusÌo and the Italian Campaign Against Landmines for this winning submission to the 2025 Youth for Humanitarian Disarmament contest! Watch here and find out more about the work in the artists own words below.
Rome,18/06/25
Work Notes
This work is dedicated to and inspired by Margaret Arach Orech, today ICBL Ambassador. I had the opportunity to meet her thanks to Tibisay Ambrosini from Campagna Italiana contro le mine. Our first encounter was hindered by a blurred and fragile internet connection and lasted for an hour and a half. I had already read her story, but nothing can compare to her voice, her laugh, and sweet smile, listened to and viewed through the screen. I had the opportunity to listen to what was under the skin of a pdf text. Although the pain and suffering she has been through, listening to her gave me the same feeling as a lullaby. She was assuring me that nothing could go wrong, things happen, and we need to look at them and see in what shapes we can model, transform, and interpret them.
Despite many why that prompt violently at first, there is always something to grasp and unveil which can give new light on volumes and edges of our emotions. So I decided that the lullaby sung by Margaret in her mother tongue, Lou language, should lead the viewer through the timeline, orienting them through what they see. The short video To Margaret recollects the different steps of the working process, composing them into a narrative in which images and sounds interchange, exploring through contrasting senses and emotions a representation of the story.
The artwork (Untitled) is a visual poem realized on a wooden board with mixed techniques.
Each material and gesture is thought and composed keeping in mind Margaret’s story.
Handmade paper, whose pulp has been mixed with gunpowder, is cut into 23 rectangles like the 23 passengers of the bus in which Margaret was sitting at the moment of the rebels’ attack in 1998 on the way to Kampala.
The fuses draw on the whiteboard, leaving the echoes of the explosions. Only their direction is premeditated; the rest is uncontrolled.
At the end, the words written with the pyrography embroider the past and present. They do not leave anything behind and keep all the pieces, re-composing them in a new body. The same fire that exploded without control is now the instrument through which the wounds are cauterized and cured.
Process, work, and data are presented in a puzzle, incomplete, suspended in time and space. We would never answer those why, something will always be missing, we cannot understand everything, but we should not worry, because from these mysteries a lullaby will rise and calm the pains. In this edge in-between dreams and reality resides the possibility to rebuild.
I would like to conclude these brief notes with a quote that Margaret shared with me from the book of Isaiah.
18 “Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
19 See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and a streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:18-19
Martina Musìo