the study of being touched by war means looking at war with the body as the locus of war experience. Children are important witnesses to war, consuming images and narratives of war even when they do not experience it directly. Through a theatrical play – Wij/Zij – Hast discusses the experience of war through a past time and place. The theatre play, performed in Belgium, is on the Beslan hostage crisis, which took place ten years earlier. The chapter discusses the variety of emotions involved in witnessing war and, in particular, witnessing war from a child’s perspective. It addresses the potential of the theatrical play in representing new perspectives to experiencing war from a distance through the movement of the actor’s bodies and the sound of their voices. Hast discusses the lack of typical emotions of war such as fear, anger and resentment and, also, the lack of social emotions such as compassion within the play. Her analysis reveals how awe and wonder of the hostage crisis are represented in children’s matter-of-fact approach to war, and how suffering is represented through physiological needs rather than psychological states identifiable to the viewer. Being a witness may also imply reflection not only on the act of witnessing violence but also on the violence inherent in the act of witnessing.
In chapter 11, Frank Möller critically explores the space of architecture as a means with which to trick viewers into engagement with the conditions depicted in a given image. The space of architecture engages vision by creating obstacles, and obstacles create the wish to conquer them. The process of conquering obstacles can be understood as a process of reflection, in the course[51] of which hitherto neutral and passive observers transfigure into participant witnesses who engage with the conditions depicted. However, the space of architecture also makes viewers wish to enter a space that is not their own and that has to be respected as someone else’s. To respect someone else’s space appears to be pertinent especially with regard to people in pain: intruding upon their space would seem to be an act of violence which disregards a person’s most intimate sphere – and his or her right to intimacy – even if the intention is to empathize with this person and to acknowledge his or her experience. Witnessing human suffering through artistic representation utilising the space of architecture, then, can in itself be an act of violence. The problematic issues are not only gratification and pleasure, identified in the aestheticisation debate as parasitical, unethical, and unproductive. The issue is also one of intrusion and violence: the violence of the photographic act is followed by the violence of the act of witnessing. A discussion of engagements in film and photography with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda serves both to substantialise this assessment and to show that both acts of violence are ultimately necessary.
“Witnesses are vital not just for enlarging the scope of observational knowledge but even more for elucidating the significance of human actions, symbolic acts, and language itself” (Margalit 2004: 181). Art witnesses – and makes others witness – politics. As the following chapters show, it does so by shaping our vision of both life and (what we regard as) reality; by carrying time and thus connecting memory and immemory with our current situation; and by partly seriously, partly humorously, and partly ironically inviting audiences’ active engagement with the conditions referenced in a given work of art. It does so by interrogating the authentic, the aesthetic. and the aesthesis as well as by employing the whole body. It does so by referencing not only that which is present, visible, and audible but also that which is absent, invisible, and inaudible. It does so by engaging with politics and political discourse in unique ways: art’s language games direct our attention to the ways in which language conditions our perception of ‘reality’ just as art’s visual games alert us to the intimate connection between what we see and what we believe this ‘reality’ to be. Art creates imaginary – and also utopian – alternatives reflecting that what is always includes (as yet unrealized) alternatives, marginalized in political discourse for a variety of reasons. Art, thus, is a political discourse, and bearing witness to politics through art is a political activity.
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Hirsch, Marianne
