Narrator: There are more than 110 million landmines buried beneath the grounds of seventy different countries. They often injure or kill civilians. To address this problem, Massoud Hassani devised a detonator called “Mine Kafon.” Here’s curator Paola Antonelli:
Curator, Paola Antonelli: Massoud grew up in Afghanistan. And when he, his brother, and their friends would play, sometimes they would make these paper toys and sometimes these toys would roll onto minefields, carried by the wind, and they could not be retrieved anymore. So that remained in his mind and he decided to transform these toys into mine detonators.
The mine detonator looks almost like a beautiful dandelion and is made with a central core that is molded plastic. So, very easy to make everywhere in the world. And then these stems that are of bamboo also an easy material to find and to grow. And these little feet are made of plastic.
And once pushed onto the minefield, the object is heavy enough to detonate a mine, but light enough that it can be carried by the wind. And when the mine explodes it, it explodes only in parts, so parts of it can be reassembled into a new Mine Kafon. It was really about making it available everywhere in the world at low cost and very easy to deploy and to fabricate.