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- Convenors:
-
Alice Tilche
(University of Leicester)
Akshay Khanna (RAPT (Centre for Research, Activism, Performance and Theatre))
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- Discussant:
-
Lucy Lowe
(University of Edinburgh)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 20 January, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel interrogates representations of suffering during the pandemic, the relationships of visibility/invisibility that obliterate certain kinds of suffering and its memory, and the ethical concerns that underlie the production of images.
Long Abstract:
Globally, the Covid-19 pandemic is being imaged and imagined through diverse ways and media. These images do not only exist in the realm of representation but have structuring effects on the unfolding and experience of the pandemic. Social media has emerged as a powerful tool for spreading (mis)information. However, it has also been key to the articulation of political society, through which communities act collectively, generate information, intervene in the public sphere and make claims of the state. This panel invites contributions focussed on understanding the visualisation of a range of different forms of suffering during the pandemic and its attendant reconfigurations of the social, economic and political spheres. In particular, we seek to understand how communities have been receiving and mobilising images. The panel will focus on understanding representations of suffering within images themselves and disturbing the political order of images - the relationships of visibility / invisibility that obliterate certain kinds of suffering and its memory. In the context of the democratisation of the ability to produce images we will revisit the 'child and vulture' debate, asking: what are the material, or ethical concerns that underlie the making of images during the pandemic? How are debates on the ethics of visuality reconfigured when a community itself is involved in the production, consumption and circulation of images? This panel is instigated by a collaborative visual art and research project that has been producing videos on the experiences of some of the most marginalised populations in India during the pandemic.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 20 January, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the management of the visuality of suffering and death in the context of the pandemic has demarcated privatised grief from the recognition of collective suffering. In doing so the Necronation in India has sought to reaffirm its monopoly over the politicisation of death.
Paper long abstract:
As a critical event (Das 1995), the COVID pandemic has generated new political modalities, questioned relationships of citizenship, and articulated as a crucial moment in the evolution of the nation-state. This paper argues that the management of the visuality of suffering and death in the context of the pandemic has demarcated privatised grief from the recognition of collective suffering. In doing so the state has sought to reaffirm its monopoly over the politicisation of death. In the decade prior to the COVID pandemic, India has seen the rise to power of ‘Erotic Nationalism’ (Nyeck 2013, khanna 2019) premised on passionate attachment to particular figures, templates and embodiments, which themselves constitute a matrix of relationships. Death being central to the erotic( Bataille 1957), the emergent ‘Necronation’ (khanna 2020) has been continually engaged with the production, consumption and signification of death. A crucial element of this is the management of the visuality of death through interventions in the mainstream and social media, like the wide circulation of brutal violence against those constituted as outside the Hindu nation. What happens when the mass suffering and death reference a failure of the nation-state itself? What happens when these deaths lie at the heart of the symbolic heart of the Hindu nation, the banks of the river Ganga? This paper looks at the images of suffering and of death and at their management through violence, incarceration, affective manipulation and the privatisation of grief as elements of the narrative of the reinforcement of Erotic Nationalism.
Paper short abstract:
The paper engages with two different strands of aesthetics of death while seeking to socialise suffering in the context of the pandemic fatalities. In one strand the dead are in open, improvised cremation or shallow water burials, and in the other they are in, closed, improvised morgues.
Paper long abstract:
This proposal foregrounds the visuality of India’s devastating second wave of Covid-19 within the backdrop of global covid deaths. In India (2021), the wave metamorphosed with the seasonal arrival of summer and brought to the surface a charnel aesthetics of death, in the form of mass open cremations. The death-pile setting was one of logwood pyre beds, rising flames, grey smoke and the smouldering dead side by side with the PPE clad funeral workers and mourners. However, we know that this mass open cremation aesthetic is neither limited to the Covid pandemic nor is it the only epidemiological referent for India across the last two centuries of recording calamities and disasters. The scenes of mass corpses floating in the river would make an equally competing claim as the master panorama of disaster deaths in India. In such a scenario, relying on heterogenous archives, we must turn away from any one signature image and think of waves of images that might help us graph and collage the movement of death during a pandemic such as the Covid-19. How might we fathom the panning effect of the global pandemic deaths through a similar waves of images such as the Indian examples mentioned above? I draw upon my decade old, self-curated, google alert archive, based on web crawling of global disaster deaths, to bring up slightly different aesthetics of death than that of mass open cremations and floating corpses. This aesthetic is of improvised morgues at the time of disasters, including covid deaths.
Paper short abstract:
At the beginning of the pandemic, COVID-19 cases in Guayaquil were overwhelming. Cell phone images of dead bodies lying on the streets in low-income neighborhoods, rapidly circulated on the internet. In this context, I ask how do these images affect individuals and communities differently?
Paper long abstract:
At the beginning of the pandemic, COVID-19 cases in Guayaquil, a coastal city of Ecuador, were overwhelming. Cell phone images of dead bodies lying on the streets, outside of homes in low-income neighborhoods, rapidly circulated on the internet, while authorities denied the severity of the spread of the disease. It was during this same period when Ecuador’s government closed its international borders and declared a national lockdown. Mobily was heavily restricted and prohibited across provinces. Nonetheless, large groups of people “escaped” Guayaquil only to find themselves discriminated against when they arrived in other localities. Coming out of Guayaquil became synonymous with carrying the virus and this was greatly influenced by the pictures that had circulated on social media. During periods of isolation people tend to rely heavily on the media for information. Nowadays it is extremely easy to take photos and videos and make them widely available. Shocking mobile phone images of the COVID-19 situation in Guayaquil became powerful compliance mechanisms elsewhere in the country. But for people fleeing the big city to find a safer place, the same images cause people to treat them with discrimination. In this context, I ask, what representations of suffering were widely circulated during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how do these images affect individuals and communities differently? How do people’s behaviors alter after being exposed to the images? What can these images contribute to the ethnographic research and analysis about care and discrimination?
Paper short abstract:
Concluding remarks addressing both theory and method. Drafting a framework for how to approach images in relation to matters of existence and sufferance.
Paper long abstract:
Catering from the diversity of topics addressed by the previous speaker, the present paper offers some concluding remarks. Addressing both matters of theory and method, it attempts at drafting a framework for how to approach images in relation to matters of existence and sufferance. What is the connection between meaning and existence, representation and performance, past and present when we look at disturbing images?