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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines how "toxic" images shape the understanding of conflicts and create the images of enemy others. These images become their own reference points, understood to be "more true" than any other images that might contradict or conflict with the narratives these "toxic" images convey.

Paper long abstract:

In the 19th century photographs were initially viewed as distortions of reality. "The hearsay of the sun" was one claim made. Yet today we see the photograph as the central form of visual documentation. This tension was discussed by Roland Barthes, who suggested that images affect us in two ways: through the punctum, the immediate pathetic effect it generates, in distinction from the studium, or the information transmitted by the image or the meanings it receives through circulation. Barthes thought the punctum was far more powerful, for it is a "wound" left by an image that trumps its studium, the message or semiotic content it discloses." The most powerful images are those that leave a lasting impact on how we understand a set of circumstances and how we imagine the actors in those circumstances. This paper explores the ways in which images shape our understanding of conflict, often creating simulacra: copies without originals - images of terrorists who rarely look "like terrorists", depictions of border crossings that are intended to frighten, and visual narratives of conflicts that simplify, flatten, and distort. Through an exploration of images associated with three events - the shootings by Mohammed Merah in France; the "crisis" at the U.S. Southern Border; and the on-going conflict in Ukraine - the paper examines how these images continue to shape the imaginaries of how these events are understood, both by the participants and by those outside of the conflict that might encourage or discourage involvement by others.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper deals with footage from an ethnographic film experiment about the life of a convicted military officer in post-authoritarian Argentina who remains silent about the perpetrated violence. The project searches how to provoke visuals that actually expose the violence through its absence.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper deals with footage from an ongoing ethnographic film experiment about the life of a convicted military officer in post-authoritarian Argentina. To remain faithful to his stubborn, yet deeply uncomfortable, silence about the crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship (1976-1983), has been an ongoing ethical and epistemological challenge. Imagining the military pact of silence therefore prompts alternative ways of ethnographic representation. But how to provoke visuals of silence that actually expose the violence through its absence? The film experiment looks for ways to depict the absence of violence in his life without reproducing denial or justification of the perpetration. Analytical awareness that our (audiovisual) descriptions of violence are basically inadequate (Crapanzano 2010) is key to the project. In philosophy this inadequacy of language is properly known as sous rature (e.g. under erasure). It involves crossing out a word within a text, but allowing it to remain legible and in place. The word is "inadequate yet necessary" (Derrida 1976). It means that there is no better word found. Erasure here does not mark a lost presence; erasure rather represents the potential impossibility of presence altogether (ibid). It is thus not the particular signs that are placed under erasure, but the whole system of signification. The workings of cinema could be seen as acts of progressive erasure: one image and one sound superseding the previous one creating an impression of fractional removal (Galpin 2017). The ethnographic film experiment can therefore ultimately be seen as a film under erasure.

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This paper analyses the artistic work of Teresa Margolles, one of the most well-known Mexican contemporary artists. Focusing on how her work transports the materiality of death, the brutalities of narco-violence and border regimes, this paper asks about the "productive provocations" in her work.

Paper long abstract:

Teresa Margolles is one of the most well-known Mexican contemporary artists, and her conceptual work has sparked admiration and disgust at the same time. Whether it concerns bubbles made out of water used by morgues in Mexico city or discussing the case of murdered transgender sex workers, Margolles has managed to achieve reactions and debates in the viewers and critics of her art. Her practice, though minimalist and conceptual, is described as shocking, and sometimes gross. How does Margolles achieve these reactions to her artistic practice in an age characterized by visual oversaturation of death and war (Sontag 2003) and an art world characterized by fatigue? Why is it that her work, though it turns away many viewers, achieves unique productivity? Based on these questions, this paper analyzes what could be termed "productive provocations" in Margolles' work. Thereby, the paper focuses specifically on how her work transports the materiality of death, the brutalities of narco-violence, and the border regimes that affect the protagonists that take center stage in her practice.

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Paper short abstract:

The Argentinian state terror, the Holocaust and the Church are at the centre of Leon Ferrari's photographic collages. Drawing on his work, I explore the relational meaning of visualisations of genocide that create a daunting awareness of evil and testify to art's transformative power.

Paper long abstract:

In 2011, during my fieldwork with Jewish Austrian-Argentinian Holocaust Survivors and the children of the disappeared in Tucumàn, Argentina, I visited the exhibition "Nosotros no sabíamos" by reknown artist León Ferrari, himself father of a disappeared son. In it, newspaper clippings from 1976 and photographic collages connected the European Holocaust, the Argentine State terror and the Catholic Church in the unsettling horror of evil, as the deeply affective exhibition disputed the "we did not know" narrative and made visible the inferno of genocidal regimes. In this paper I draw on the artists' work to tease out how art can help us understand patterns of state violence and genocide, and how his photographic collages emphasise justice, memory and non-repetition beyond evidence. Attending to the visual as a presence, a communicative avenue and an affective medium, I analyse the relational meaning of new 'ways of seeing' (Berger 1972) that create awareness of global patterns of violence and self-reflection. Following Rose (2001) in that visual renderings are never innocent, I furthermore discuss the way in which the visual politics of genocide, and especially comparisons with the Holocaust, helped activists and victims to create narratives for justice and memory that not only look at the past but seek to engage a future of global connections. Beyond individual or national borders and the significant differences in the genocidal practices in Argentina and elsewhere, I argue that art such as Ferrari's work affects those who dare to look with a daunting awareness of empathy and responsibility.

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Paper short abstract:

The way refugees are visualized is inherently linked to the way they are socially and politically perceived. Drawing on the example of Afghan artists' representations, the paper asks how image making creates a space for contestation against national and European asylum policies and border regimes.

Paper long abstract:

With images being omnipresent in our contemporary world (Mirzoeff 2015), I argue that the way refugees are visualized is inherently linked to the way they are socially and politically perceived, as images play a key role in regulating political discourse, creating categories such as legal/illegal and sustaining stereotypes and mobilizing political convictions. Further, images have become integral parts in creating correlations between a European migration crisis and complex negotiations of European border regimes. But despite pictures relevance, refugees' own visual representations remain almost completely absent from public as well as scholarly interest. As part of my PhD research, this paper draws on the example of Afghan refugee art and media collectives' visual representations, asking what subversive tactics emerge through their images and how image making creates a space of contestation against national and European asylum policies and border regimes. The paper's main argument of the image as a space of contestation is underpinned by the concept of the space of appearance as theorized by Arendt, taking visibility as basic condition to political participation (Arendt 1985). To expand on this aesthetic-political ontologies, it further builds upon Rancière's understanding of politics as 'a question of aesthetics and a matter of appearances' (Rancière 2013) and draws on Ariella Azoulay's theorizations of the image as a space of citizenship (2008, 2012). By countering and deconstructing common images of refugees, this research aims to re-work a dominant visual field, and to bring the refugee himself in the center of knowledge production.

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Paper short abstract:

Contemporary Syrian films and visual art deliberately contrasts with the temporality of 'high speed eventfulness' (Wedeen 2019) that defines information and image circulation from the Syrian conflict. It represents an important critique of violence in the contemporary global media landscape.

Paper long abstract:

The Syrian conflict is now entering its ninth year and as of this writing, over 570,000 are dead and 10,000 missing (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights 2019). In this context of the most socially mediated and digitally visually documented conflict in history (Lynch et al 2014), the work of Syrian visual artists and filmmakers is particularly relevant as they privilege forms that emphasize storytelling, experimental narratives and individual testimonials that contrast with what Lisa Wedeen (Wedeen 2019) has described as the temporality of 'high speed eventfulness' that defines the circulation of information and images from the Syrian conflict. Examining the work of several Syrian artists, filmmakers and film collectives, this paper will argue that their work represents a new critique of violence, one that emphasizes how the hyper visualization and sensationalizing of violent images from the war constitutes a necropolitics (Sai 2015), and that both challenges Azoulay's concept of photography as a civil contract and the possibility for an ethical watching of images that may produce an 'emergency claim' to political action (Azoulay 2008) and responds to Sontag's warning of the power of violent images to anaesthetize and transfix (Sontag 2003). It will further demonstrate how some of these artists, such as the anonymous film collective Abounaddara, are making new rights claims by imagining and advocating for as yet non-existent rights. It will argue for the ethical and political relevance and provocation of that performative imaginary and critique of violence in the contemporary global media landscape.

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing from my ethnography with a contemporary democratic independentist Basque social movement, I examine the political imagination of visual production as sites of contestation, arguing they are more concerned with happiness and hope, rather than contesting violence and fear associated with ETA

Paper long abstract:

For at least half a century, Basque sociopolitics has been pictured through armed struggle and statehood desire, and Basque people banned from the possibility of imagining themselves outside a dreaded cycle of terror and violence -whether coming from ETA, the State (Spanish and French), or paramilitary forces. Scholarly research has abundantly addressed the connections between Basque nationalism and violence, focusing on a diverse range of topics such as the suffering of victims of terrorism, the experiences of Francoist repression, the local/daily techniques to deal with fear and suspicion, and even the affective impacts of images and related visual products produced by armed and non armed organizations concerning independence political struggle. Within the current Basque context of peace process that eventually led to ETA's disbanding, new conundrums have been posed for people engaged in self-determination claims: what happens when extreme and chronic violence is displaced to welfare, and to another region as Catalonia? How to produce new representations of independence not be confused with those of the violent past? Drawing from my ethnography with the members of a Basque social movement that has been claiming Basques' Right to Decide since 2013, I analyse the political imagination conveyed by their digital and audio-visual production as sites of contestation. I will argue that this grass-roots' way of visually provoking, notwithstanding looking forward to producing alternative images to those of ETA, is more concerned with how representing happiness and hope, rather than contesting violence and fear.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the construction of identity, place, and politics as articulated through murals produced by Zapotec artists in Los Angeles, CA as a way of understanding intersecting histories of Indigenous migration, urban displacement, interracial community formation, and hip-hop culture.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, and visual and cultural analysis, this paper examines the construction of identity, place, and politics as articulated through murals produced by Zapotec artists in Los Angeles, CA. This talk uses Arjun Appadurai's notion of "migrant archives" to show how both the content and location of the murals speak to the intersecting histories of Indigenous migration, urban displacement, interracial community formation, and hip-hop culture. Using these artistic interventions as an entry point, this paper hopes to add to how we think about transnational migration, relational racial formation, and cultural production by decentering the economy and state and centering young artists as makers of space, place, and collective identities.

If young people are present in social science research on transnational migration between the U.S. and Mexico at all, they are often framed as being responsible for "negative social remittances" such as pathological, anti-social behavior learned in U.S. inner-cities. This paper pushes back against these criminalizing tropes of Mexican youth and U.S. minority-majority cities by reframing them as cultural producers and sites of cultural exchange and mutual recognition, respectively. This paper asks, how do murals change how people experience and interact with urban space? Can murals foster mutual recognition across social difference? Does the cooptation of street art and murals by corporate advertisers dampen the impact of community murals for passersby? How are murals received across generation and racial/ethnic difference?

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Paper short abstract:

The main objective of ths paper is to look at the way some memorial projects, such as the realization of murals depicting Medellin's context of violence, can serve as sources of resistance.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, Colombia announced the end of a decades-long internal conflict. Yet despite this progress the country lingers on in a state of "quasi-post-conflict" or "post-agreements". This paper, drawing on case studies in Medellin's "barrios populares", traumatized by guerillas, para-militarism and gang violence, suggests that some "subterranean memorial practices" that have recently emerged are forms of resistance. In a context of competing representations and discourses on the armed conflict, memorial entrepreneurs in these marginal urban areas, using creative means such as the visual remembrance of violence, resist the loss of their territories, challenge hegemonic narratives on the war and propose alternative visions of violence prevention. The main objective is to look at the way some memorial projects, such as the realization of murals depicting Medellin's context of violence, can serve as sources of resistance. Several case-studies taking place in the comuna 13 and the barrio Pablo Escobar will demonstrate the role these visuals play in the city memorialscape, through their diffusion of diverse and sometimes antagonistic representations of the war and the ensuing peace in Colombia.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine how 'war trophy' photographs are visible evidence that locates the body of the child as the representative site of the mutual, corporeal suffering of violence and oppression that links Dalit communities in Tamilnadu with Sri Lankan Tamils.

Paper long abstract:

Hundreds of posters depicting the image of a young boy's bullet-ridden body created a stark visual rupture when pasted over the daily circulations of imagery along the streets of Madurai, Tamilnadu in March 2013. The photograph was one of a series of images taken on a mobile phone smuggled out of the Sri Lanka depicting twelve-year-old Balachandran, son of LTTE leader Prabhakaran, before and after he was killed by military forces while in their captivity. After broadcast in a series of documentaries on Channel 4 years after the end of the civil war in 2009, the photographs were disseminated via news media in Tamilnadu. Local olitical parties commissioned posters with Balachandran's photograph in a call for a UNHRC investigation into what they claimed were atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan military against Tamils. This paper will examine the global media flows that help to produce and reify local Madurai Tamil identities by demonstrating that for those in the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), a Dalit political party, the 'war trophy' photographs are visible evidence of the mutual, corporeal suffering of violence and oppression they articulate links Dalit communities in Tamilnadu with Sri Lankan Tamils.

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Paper short abstract:

Inspired by film's 'transculturality' (McDougall), a documentary I made aimed to show rural life continuities among leaders of communities in an ethnic conflict. I conclude that a ' visual common' is built only through montage: invisible relations between individual lives are then allowed to appear

Paper long abstract:

What does an audiovisual approach contribute to the reflection on the common (Mezzadra and Nielson 2013) within the fragmentation derived from "multiculturalism" in Latinamerica (Bocarejo and Restrepo 2011)? Born in the interdisciplinary investigation "Social movements and the construction of the common in Colombia today", in my presentation I reflectively discuss the making of a documentary film about an intercultural peace initiative of three social leaders in the Cauca Region, whose communities have been in conflict for years: an indigenous Nasa, an Afro-descendant and a peasant.

In addition to telling their story, the audiovisual treatment aimed to make visible the rural life continuities that the three leaders' daily lives share: to build a 'visual common'. It was strongly inspired by the work of McDougall (1998), for whom the fundamental particularity of the visual medium in Anthropology is its ability to be "transcultural", in counterweight to the cultural difference emphasis that has traditionally concerned the written discipline.

But what does the realization process ultimately tell us? First, is shows the dislocations of "ethnicity" by the three subjects (McDougall 1999) as well as it makes visible that an "invention of the ethnic" (Segato 1999) is discursive, in opposition to the daily live continuities that might enable a 'visual common' to emerge. However, going deeper, that 'visual common' does not appear as a visual feature by itself, as McDougall might put it, but through the process of montage, which allows invisible relations (Suhr y Willerslev 2012) among those three individual lives to appear.