Ban Naphia
Laos is the most bombed country, per capita, in the world with more than two million tons of ordnance dropped on it during the Vietnam War, up to 30% of which failed to explode on impact. More than 50,000 people have been killed and injured as a result of UXO incidents between 1964 and 2011. At least of 20,000 of them since the war ended.
In many villages gathering metal salvaged from either Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) or the cases that surround it has been a major source of income for them and one of the main causes of UXO accidents since the war ended more than 40 years ago.
In the village of Ban Naphia, a remote Tai Phouan village in mountainous Xieng Khouang Province, metalworkers such as Ms Vanthone and her family cast spoons and bracelets made from recycled aluminium sourced from Vietnam War debris and melted in an earthen kiln.
12 artisan families began transforming war scrap into spoons (150,000 per year) in the 1970s to supplement subsistence farming activities. Supported by the Swiss NGO Helvetas, the project works to make the scrap metal supply chain safer for artisans and scrap collectors by collaborating with organisations such as Mines Advisory Group (MAG) that specialise in unexploded ordnance removal and education. More recently the villagers have started making bracelets and other items.
I was driven to photograph these everyday items, part attracted by the ingenious use of found items and part shocked by the reliance on the illegal scrap trade and its disastrous consequences more than 40 years after the Vietnam War.