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Picture credits: Cover photograph "Dust and smoke on helicopter landing zone, enemy possible, Zhari District, Kandahar, Afghanistan. 2010", courtesy of © Louie Palu Jacket design by Bettina Lehfeldt, Kleinmachnow, Germany – www.lehfeldtgraphic.de Copy edit: Alison Romer, Lancaster, UK Technical editing: Anja Borkam, Jena, Germany Printed in Europe on acid-free paper by paper&tinta, Warsaw, Poland

## **List of Contents**

## **List of Figures**

#### **Fig. 2.1**

Louie Palu, Screen capture still photograph from video made by the Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan as it appears in Louie Palu's documentary "Kandahar Journals" (76 minutes 2015). 2015 Photo © Louie Palu

#### **Fig. 2.2**

Louie Palu, Screen capture still photograph from video made by ISIS of the murder of American Journalist James Foley in 2014.

#### **Fig. 2.3**

Louie Palu, "Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of Military Police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002." DoD photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy.

#### **Fig. 5.1**

Dave Hullfish Bailey and Sam Watson, *Maiwar Performance 2014* (stills); video, colour, sound, edition of 5. Duration 0:12:00, looped. Courtesy David Pestorious Projects, Brisbane, Australia.

#### **Fig. 5.2**

Dave Hullfish Bailey and Sam Watson, *Maiwar Performance 2014* (stills); video, colour, sound, edition of 5. Duration 0:12:00, looped. Courtesy David Pestorious Projects, Brisbane, Australia.

#### **Fig. 5.3**

Richard Bell, *Uz vs Them* 2006; single-channel digital video, edition 2/5. Duration 0:2:20. Collection of The University of Queensland, Gift of Richard Bell through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2009. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.

#### **Fig. 6.1**

*Behind the Shadow of the Pain* (*Tras la sombra del dolor*) by Luis Cuba Arango (Pampamarca, Vinchos). Reprinted with permission from Servicio Educativos Rurales, Colectivo Yuyarisun (2004), *Rescate por la memoria*. Ayacucho: Colectivo Yuyarisun, Ministerio Británico para el Desarrollo International, Organización Holandesa para la Cooperación International al Desarrollo, p. 17.

#### **Fig. 6.2**

Edilberto Jiménez Quispe, *Llaqta Maqta (A Dance)*. Reprinted with artist's permission from *Chungui: Violencia y trazos de memoria*. Lima: Comisdeh (2005), p. 71.

#### **Fig. 6.3**

Edilberto Jiménez Quispe, *The Senderistas Sacked Yerbabuena* (Yerbabuena, Chungui, May 12, 1984). Reprinted with artist's permission from *Chungui: Violencia y trazos de memoria*. Lima: Comisdeh, p. 73.

#### **Fig. 6.4**

Edilberto Jiménez Quispe, *When Sendero Arrived* (Chungui, 1983) Reprinted with artist's permission from *Chungui: Violencia y trazos de memoria*. Lima: Comisdeh, p. 79.

#### **Fig. 6.5**

Edilberto Jiménez Quispe, *They Would Have Killed Us If We Didn't Go with Them*  (Chungui, 1985). Reprinted with artist's permission from *Chungui: Violencia y trazos de memoria*. Lima: Comisdeh, p. 151.

#### **Fig. 6.6**

Edilberto Jiménez Quispe, *They Said, "You Must Obey Those in Charge"* (Chillihua, Chungui, 1984). Reprinted with artist's permission from *Chungui: Violencia y trazos de memoria*. Lima: Comisdeh, p. 85.

#### **Fig. 6.7**

Edilberto Jiménez Quispe, *As Day Was Night* (Oronqoy, Chungui, 1984). Reprinted with artist's permission from *Chungui: Violencia y trazos de memoria*. Lima: Comisdeh, p. 181.

#### **Fig. 6.8**

Edilberto Jiménez Quispe, *Working Together* (Concertación). Reprinted with artist's permission from *Chungui: Violencia y trazos de memoria*. Lima: Comisdeh, p. 209.

#### **Fig. 10.1**

*Wij/Zij*. Actors are demarcating lines (photo: Theatre Bronks). Reproduced with permission.

#### **Fig. 10.2**

*Wij/Zij*. Detonator and wires (photo: Theatre Bronks). Reproduced with permission.

#### **Fig. 11.1**

Richard Misrach, 'Norco Cumulus Cloud, Shell Oil Refinery, Norco, Louisiana', 1998. © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles. Reproduced with permission.

#### **Fig. 11.2**

Rafiki Ubaldo, 'Clearly visible on this ID are the terms *Hutu*, *Tutsi*, *Twa* and *Naturalisé*. Having a Tutsi marked ID meant death. This ID card is kept in a glass cupboard in the underground section of Nyamata Church Genocide Memorial. The Memorial is located in the Bugesera region, Eastern Province, about 35 kilometres outside Kigali, the capital'. Photograph and caption: Rafiki Ubaldo; reproduced with permission.

#### **Fig. 11.3**

'Nobody is illegal – papers for all!' (Praça Martim Moniz, Lisbon, August 27, 2009). Photograph: Frank Möller.

#### **Fig. 11.4**

Pieter Hugo, 'SITE OF A ROADBLOCK.GATYAZO.GIKONGORO.' Reproduced courtesy of the Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town-Johannesburg / Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

## **List of Plates**

**1** – Louie Palu, An Afghan soldier eats grapes during a patrol in Pashmul in Zhari District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. 2008 Photo © Louie Palu

**2** – Louie Palu, A man with hands bound behind his back and killed execution style on the banks of a river in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico. 2012 Photo © Louie Palu

**3** – Louie Palu, Anti Sinaloa Cartel leader Chapo Guzman graffiti that has been painted over on a wall in the Juarez Valley located east of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. 2012 Photo © Louie Palu

**4** – Louie Palu, Migrant labourers from Guerrero State working at a farm near Culiacan, Sinaloa picking tomatoes destined for export across the border to the United States and Canada. 2012 Photo © Louie Palu

**5** – Louie Palu, A detainee prays in his cell in Camp 5, which is a maximumsecurity detention facility where the most uncooperative as well as detainees with the most intelligence value are housed at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 2008 Photo © Louie Palu

**6** – Louie Palu, Cover of the publication "Guantanamo Operational Security Review" a self published concept newspaper by Louie Palu in 2013. Photo © Louie Palu

**7** – Louie Palu, Page spread from the publication "Guantanamo Operational Security Review" a self published concept newspaper by Louie Palu in 2013 showing the detention centers document with deleted file numbers of photos taken by Louie Palu. Photo © Louie Palu

**8** – Louie Palu, Inside page spreads from the publication "Guantanamo Operational Security Review" a self published concept newspaper by Louie Palu in 2013 showing images taken by Louie Palu. Photo © Louie Palu

**9** – Louie Palu, Inside page spreads expanded into posters from the publication "Guantanamo Operational Security Review" a self published concept newspaper by Louie Palu in 2013 showing images taken by Louie Palu. Photo © Louie Palu

**10** – *Behind the Shadow of the Pain* (*Tras la sombra del dolor*) by Luis Cuba Arango (Pampamarca, Vinchos). Reprinted with permission from Servicio Educativos Rurales, Colectivo Yuyarisun, *Rescate por la memoria*, 17.

**11** – Dave Hullfish Bailey + Sam Watson, Maiwar Performance 2014 (stills). Video, colour, sound, edition of 5. Duration 0:12:00, looped. Courtesy David Pestorious Projects, Brisbane.

**12** – Richard Bell, *Uz vs Them* 2006, Single-channel digital video, edition 2/5, duration 0:2:20. Collection of The University of Queensland, Gift of Richard Bell through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2009. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

**13** – *Wij/Zij.* Detonator and wires. (Photo by: Theatre Bronks.)

**14** – Richard Misrach: Norco Cumulus Cloud, Shell Oil Refinery, Norco, Louisiana, 1998 © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.

**15** – Rafiki Ubaldo, Clearly visible on this ID are the terms *Hutu*, *Tutsi*, *Twa* and *Naturalisé*. Having a Tutsi marked ID meant death. This ID card is kept in a glass cupboard in the underground section of Nyamata Church Genocide Memorial. The Memorial is located in the Bugesera region, Eastern Province, about 35 kilometres outside Kigali, the capital. Courtesy the artist.

**16** – Pieter Hugo, SITE OF A ROADBLOCK.GATYAZO.GIKONGORO. Reproduced courtesy of the Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town-Johannesburg / Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.

## **Contributors**

**Suvi Alt** is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research examines contemporary biopolitics of development and notions of a "beyond" of the biopolitical. Her broader research interests include continental political philosophy as well as critical perspectives on security, rights and development. Her latest publication is 'Darkness in a Blink of an Eye: Action and the Onto-Poetics of a Beyond' in *Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities*.

**Roland Bleiker** is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland where he coordinates an interdisciplinary research program on Visual Politics. Recent publications include *Aesthetics and World Politics* (2009/2012); a forum on 'Emotions and World Politics' in *International Theory* (2014) co-edited with Emma Hutchison; and 'Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics', *Millennium: Journal of International Studies* (2015). Bleiker is also the editor of *Visual Global Politics* (Routledge: forthcoming 2017).

Associate Professor **Sally Butler** lectures in art history in the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. Her most recent publication in the area of visual politics is co-authored with Roland Bleiker and titled 'Radical Dreaming: Indigenous Art and Cultural Diplomacy', *International Political Sociology* (2016).

**Susanna Hast** works as a postdoctoral researcher in the research project 'Incorporating vulnerability: a non-fragmented approach to feminist research on violence' at Gender Studies of the University of Helsinki in Finland. She studies emotions in war experience in Chechnya and Ukraine. She is also a partner of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Russian Studies, Aleksanteri Institute. Hast is currently writing a hybrid monograph book with audio material on songwriting, performance and war experience in Chechnya for E- International Relations.

**Tommi Kotonen** holds a PhD at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In 2012, he defended his doctoral theses with the title *To Write a Republic: American Political Poetry from Whitman to 9/11*. He works currently as a Research Coordinator at the University of Jyväskylä.

**Bruno Lefort** currently works on a postdoctoral grant funded by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation at the University of Montreal's Department of Political Science. He is also an associated researcher at the French Institute for the Near East (IFPO) in Beirut. He holds a doctoral degree in Social Sciences and Political Science from the University of Tampere and Aix-Marseille University. His recent publications include 'The Art of Bypassing: Students' Politicisation in Beirut' in *Mediterranean Politics* (forthcoming).

**Kia Lindroos** is University lecturer and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research explores the interdisciplinary field of political theory, philosophy and arts. She is the convenor of the ECPR SG Politics and the Arts (www.jyu.fi/ytk/laitokset/ yfi/en/research/projects/research-groups/polarts). She is also Member of the Finnish Academy Research Council for Culture and Social Sciences.

**Dana Mills** teaches political theory and feminist theory at Oxford. In 2016– 2017 she will be a Visiting Fellow at NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts and the Hannah Arendt Archives. Her first book, *Dance and Politics: Moving beyond Boundaries*, is out with Manchester University Press in the fall of 2016.

**Cynthia E. Milton** holds a Canada Research Chair in Latin American History at the Université de Montréal, Canada. She presently works on historical and artistic representations in the aftermath of conflict, in particular contemporary Peru. She is the editor of *Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-Telling in Post-Shining Path Peru* (2014), a co-editor of *Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places* (2011) and *The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule* (2005). Honors include the Bolton-Johnson Prize for *The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador* (2007) and the Alexander Von Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship. Milton was named to the inaugural cohort of The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada.

**Frank Möller** is a Senior Research Fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere, Finland, and the Co-Convenor of the ECPR Standing Group on Politics and the Arts. Recent publications include 'Politics and Art', *Oxford Handbook Online Political Science* (Oxford University Press, 2016) and 'From Aftermath to Peace: Reflections on a Photography of Peace', *Global Society* (2016). His most recent book is *Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorsdhip and the Politics of Violence* (2013).

**Louie Palu** is an award winning documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in festivals, publications, and exhibitions internationally. He is a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a 2016–2017 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Louie Palu is the recipient of numerous awards including a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Grant.

## **Preface**

The ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research) Standing Group on Politics and the Arts was founded in 1996 by Maureen Whitebrook, who called the group for the first initial workshop in Bordeaux. Already at that time, the idea was to analyse art as a form of political discourse. Over the years, the activities of the Standing Group revolved around such issues as terror and art, violence and non-violence, art and reconciliation, and aesthetic representations of and interventions in international conflicts. Furthermore, the Standing Group explored the politicization of film, literature and photography; the poetic form; narrative practices; and, most recently, the art of peace.

Art as political witness was included in the Group's research agenda for the first time on the occasion of the 2013 ECPR General Conference in Bordeaux. In Glasgow, one year later, the Group intensified its engagement with the role and function of art as political witness in a section entirely dedicated to this subject. We invited panels and papers expanding the range of political science by problematizing the concept of art in connection with political witnessing; elaborating the political-ness of artistic witnessing; and exploring the concept of artistic witnessing as political activity. We were interested in the temporality of witnessing including reflection of the past and anticipation of the future in artistic and aesthetic engagements with politics and the political.

We would like to thank all friends and colleagues – those who are contributing to the Group's overall activities, and especially those who participated in the intense discussions on art as political witness in Bordeaux, Glasgow and elsewhere. Special thanks are due to the contributors to this volume and the artists who generously granted permission to reproduce their work in this book. Indeed, the Standing Group has always been interested in dialogue between scholars and artists and we are extremely happy to have Louie Palu among the contributors to this volume. We are also grateful to the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tampere and the School's dean, Risto Kunelius, for subsidizing the language-editing stage of this project. Finally, many thanks are due to Barbara Budrich Publishers, especially to our editor Sarah Rögl, and also to Jakob Horstmann and Ulrike Schmitz for their initial interest in this project.

Kia Lindroos, Jyväskylä

Frank Möller, Tampere

**Plate 1**: Louie Palu, An Afghan soldier eats grapes during a patrol in Pashmul in Zhari District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. 2008 Photo © Louie Palu

**Plate 2**: Louie Palu, A man with hands bound behind his back and killed execution style on the banks of a river in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico. 2012 Photo © Louie Palu

**Plate 3**: Louie Palu, Anti Sinaloa Cartel leader Chapo Guzman graffiti that has been painted over on a wall in the Juarez Valley located east of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. 2012 Photo © Louie Palu

**Plate 4**: Louie Palu, Migrant labourers from Guerrero State working at a farm near Culiacan, Sinaloa picking tomatoes destined for export across the border to the United States and Canada. 2012 Photo © Louie Palu

**Plate 5**: Louie Palu, A detainee prays in his cell in Camp 5, which is a maximum-security detention facility where the most uncooperative as well as detainees with the most intelligence value are housed at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 2008 Photo © Louie Palu

**Plate 6**: Louie Palu, Cover of the publication "Guantanamo Operational Security Review" a self published concept newspaper by Louie Palu in 2013. Photo © Louie Palu

**Plate 7**: Louie Palu, Page spread from the publication "Guantanamo Operational Security Review" a self published concept newspaper by Louie Palu in 2013 showing the detention centers document with deleted file numbers of photos taken by Louie Palu. Photo © Louie Palu

**Plate 8**: Louie Palu, Inside page spreads from the publication "Guantanamo Operational Security Review" a self published concept newspaper by Louie Palu in 2013 showing images taken by Louie Palu. Photo © Louie Palu

**Plate 9**: Louie Palu, Inside page spreads expanded into posters from the publication "Guantanamo Operational Security Review" a self published concept newspaper by Louie Palu in 2013 showing images taken by Louie Palu. Photo © Louie Palu

**Plate 10**: *Behind the Shadow of the Pain* (*Tras la sombra del dolor*) by Luis Cuba Arango (Pampamarca, Vinchos). Reprinted with permission from Servicio Educativos Rurales, Colectivo Yuyarisun, *Rescate por la memoria*, 17

**Plate 11**: Dave Hullfish Bailey + Sam Watson, Maiwar Performance 2014 (stills). Video, colour, sound, edition of 5. Duration 0:12:00, looped. Courtesy David Pestorious Projects, Brisbane

**Plate 12**: Richard Bell, *Uz vs Them* 2006, Single-channel digital video, edition 2/5, duration 0:2:20. Collection of The University of Queensland, Gift of Richard Bell through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2009. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

**Plate 13**: *Wij/Zij.* Detonator and wires. (Photo by Theatre Bronks)

**Plate 14**: Richard Misrach: Norco Cumulus Cloud, Shell Oil Refinery, Norco, Louisiana, 1998 © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles

**Plate 15**: Rafiki Ubaldo, Clearly visible on this ID are the terms *Hutu*, *Tutsi*, *Twa* and *Naturalisé*. Having a Tutsi marked ID meant death. This ID card is kept in a glass cupboard in the underground section of Nyamata Church Genocide Memorial. The Memorial is located in the Bugesera region, Eastern Province, about 35 kilometres outside Kigali, the capital. Courtesy the artist

**Plate 16**: Pieter Hugo, SITE OF A ROADBLOCK.GATYAZO. GIKONGORO. Reproduced courtesy of the Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town-Johannesburg / Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

## **1. Witnessing in Contemporary Art and Politics**

#### **Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller**

In this book, we are exploring the practice of bearing witness to politics through art. The contributors to this volume reflect on the concept of art and selected aspects of understanding the role of art and different artistic genres in connection with political witnessing. While exploring art as political witness, the contributors focus on art or politics or witnessing or a combination of the above but, essentially, all of them utilise – implicitly or explicitly – concepts of witnessing. They acknowledge, discuss and build upon the existing literature in light of their individual subject matter, regarded from different disciplinary angles including art history and political science. They elaborate on the politicalness of artistic witnessing and explore the concept of witnessing as a form of political activity. The book addresses both conceptual and theoretical questions and presents theoretically reflected case studies, including selected artistic works.

The contributors to this volume explore the work of both professional artists and non-artists' use of artistic forms of expression when witnessing politics. The chapters reflect the current interest in the humanities and social sciences in the idea – or the question – of being a witness. They address this idea by interrogating and expanding concepts of witnessing and their uses in artistic, historical and political practice. In the present chapter, we review the existing literature on the concept of being a witness and correlate it with the following chapters.

### **Being a Witness**

A witness is someone who is "present as a spectator or auditor".1 If this someone is the only one who can testify from personal observation, and if material evidence with which to support this testimony is lacking, then testimony appears to be especially important because it reveals things we would otherwise not be aware of. Such testimony, however, "relies on an act of faith: we must choose whether we believe the witness or nor" (Korhonen 2008: 115).

1 *The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles*, Vol. II, p. 2562.

Traditionally defined, a witness is someone "who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation".2 In the criminal justice system, as well as in the social sciences and humanities, this understanding of being a witness – especially an *eye*witness – has been widely applied to testimony to violent, tragic and traumatic events such as the Holocaust. This approach to witnessing is a rather narrow one: in order to qualify as a witness, you have to see something with your own eyes at the exact point in time when this something happens. As the following discussion will show, much of the emerging literature on witnessing is interested in expanding our understanding of what it means to be a witness.

To be able to be a witness includes some form of visual and/or bodily connection to the matters witnessed. For example, Gideon Hausner, the Attorney General of the State of Israel and chief prosecutor at the Eichmann trial, wanted "people who would tell what they had seen with their own eyes and what they had experienced on their own bodies" (quoted in Wieviorka 2006: 70). Hausner adds to the *eye*-witness who testifies from personal observation the *body*-witness who testifies on the basis of what he or she experienced on their own body. Indeed, *observation* – being a spectator – is often deemed insufficient in order for a person to qualify as witness. As David Simpson notes, the "person who simply notices but does not act" – the spectator, the bystander, the onlooker, the *voyeur* – "has been deemed most intolerable" (Simpson 2006: 3; for a defence of the *voyeur* in the context of witnessing people in pain, see Ledbetter 2012: 3–14). Simpson couples two words – *simply* and *notices* – the connection between which should be carefully reflected upon (Möller 2013: 47): is noticing simple, and who simply notices? In any case, reflecting scepticism about the moral position of the spectator, Diana Taylor (2003: 243) defines the "role of witness" more ambitiously "as responsible, ethical, participant rather than spectator to crisis". Building on Taylor's approach, the *participant* witness has been introduced into the literature as someone who (self-)critically engages with the conditions depicted in an image, including his or her own subject positions in connection with these conditions (Möller 2013: 36–55). Thus, in order to be considered a witness some form of engagement beyond being present and being able to testify from personal observation is often deemed necessary.

With regard to the 1970s and early 1980s, Annette Wieviorka (2006: 96) writes compellingly about *the era of the witness* characterized by "the systematic collection of audiovisual testimonies" as regards Holocaust experiences and memories of experiences. Both terms are important here – *era* and *witness*: *witness* as understood in Hausner's sense as above (eye and body), and *era* because the issue at that time was not only one of people testifying on the basis of their own

2 *The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles*, Vol. II, p. 2562.

experience, but also one of general interest in their testimonies among a wider audience. Such interest had largely been absent during the first period after the Holocaust. It was during the Eichmann trial and thus before *the era of the witness* that "[f]or the first time since the end of the war, the witnesses had the feeling that they were being heard" (ibid.: 84). The trial helped transform *witnesses* into *survivors*, recognized by society "as such" (ibid.: 88).

However, Primo Levi (1989: 83–84) notes that "we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses". He specifies:

We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the 'Muslims,' the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.

The survivors can testify to certain events based on their own experience but their testimony is "a discourse 'on behalf of third parties,' the story of things seen at close hand, not experienced personally" (Levi 1989: 84). Giorgio Agamben, when discussing Levi's writings, comments that "[w]hoever assumes the charge of bearing witness in their name" – that is, in the name of Levi's "complete witness" – "knows that he or she must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness" (Agamben 2002: 34).

Discourses and practices revolving around the Holocaust and the memory of the Holocaust have "become, for better or for worse, the definitive model for memory construction" (Wieviorka 2006: xiv). Such construction is not limited to the ways discussed by Wieviorka. In her chapter titled *Dancing Memory*, Dana Mills looks at the Holocaust as one of the biggest catalysers of the foundation of the state of Israel, as well as one of the most formative elements in the creation of Israeli identity (chapter 3, this volume). As such, it has been hugely influential in Israeli artistic language and specifically in Israeli dance. She focuses on readings of two dance works: *Ami Yam, Ami Ya'ar*, a dance work performed by the Batsheva Dance Company in the 1960s (choreography: John Cranko) and *Memento Mori*, performed by the Kibbutz Dance Company in the 1990s (choreography: Rami Be'er). These are two works in which the Holocaust plays a central role. Mills analyses the ways in which these dance works record shifting discourses of citizenship in Israeli society, from a republican discourse to a liberal one. Rather than paying exclusive attention to the complexities of the choreographies of these dance works, equal attention should be devoted to the complexities of identity the dance works engage with. Dance, as a method of witnessing, testifies to these complexities. Furthermore, dance, as Mills argues, "cannot only witness shifts in discourses of citizenship but [also] the price hegemonic discourses bear on the moving body. The moving body remembers the price it has to pay for joining in with collective enterprises". While Wieviorka does not explicitly address the question of art as political witness, she acknowledges that political testimony can be transformed "into a work of art" (Wieviorka 2006: 83).3 Such transformation may not be the main purpose of testimony (see our discussion of Avishai Margalit's work below) but it is nevertheless important.

There can be observed a certain recent expansion of the concept of being a witness, illustrated by such qualifiers as *expert*, *moral*, *silent*, *transparent*, *convincing*, *secondary*, *post-factum* or *invisible,* to name but a few, all of which indicate the need for differentiation with regard to the concept of being a witness. The *expert* witness, for example, relies – and makes others rely – on the epistemological advantage resulting from specialist and exclusive knowledge based on his or her professional education. The criminal justice system and politico-historical contexts requiring specialist knowledge often rely on such a witness.4 This approach is closely related to the *transparent* witness, a professional or nonprofessional documentarian who, in addition to demonstrating his or her own point of view, acknowledges the complexity of the events depicted and appears to be "fair" *vis-à-vis* the subjects and conditions depicted (Zuckerman 2014: 40– 41). Here, transparency refers to verifiability and fairness.

#### **Morality and Observation**

Avishai Margalit identifies the *moral* witness in terms of "knowledge-byacquaintance of suffering" (Margalit 2004: 149). In order to qualify as moral witness, "[h]e or she should witness – indeed, they should experience – suffering inflicted by an unmitigated evil regime" (ibid.: 148).5 "Being a moral witness involves witnessing actual suffering, not just intended suffering" (ibid.: 149). It also involves experience of suffering, not just observing (the) suffering (of others). Recall that Levi (1989: 84), too, distinguishes "things seen at close hand" from things "experienced personally", the one attributed to the survivor, the other to the "true" witness.

3 Her example is Claude Lanzmann's film *Shoah*. Importantly, the "witness is the bearer of an experience that, albeit unique, does not exist on its own, but only in the

testimonial situation in which it takes places" (p. 82). 4 Wieviorka (2006: 57) reports that at the Eichmann trial, "[f]or the first time …, a historian, Salo Baron, then a professor at Columbia University, was called to the witness stand to provide a historical framework for the trial". In literature, the

expert witness appears for example in James (1977). 5 We would like to decouple Margalit's discussion from "unmitigated evil regime[s]" and expand it to all political regimes.

Margalit (2004: 149–150) stresses that an *observer* can also be a moral witness (although she or he cannot be a "paradigmatic case of a moral witness". An observer can be a moral witness on condition that, just like the sufferer, she or he is "at personal risk" (ibid.: 150) – risk both in the form of "belonging to the category of people toward whom the evil deeds are directed" (ibid.) and risk in the form of "trying to document and record what happens for some future use" (ibid.). The use of the present tense in these conditions for risk – deeds *are*, not *were*, directed towards a certain group of people, and witnesses record what happen*s*, not what happen*ed* – implies contemporaneity. Aftermath artists (see below) cannot be moral witnesses of the original event, only of the aftermath as "the authority of a moral witness comes from being an eye-witness" (ibid.: 173).

Artists who make record of their own suffering, inflicted on them by others, are paradigmatic moral witnesses. Artists can also be classified as moral witnesses if they belong to the category of people who were targeted even if they, the artists, were not themselves targeted. If they do *not* belong to the same category of people, then artists documenting or recording the suffering of others can be, but do not necessarily have to be, moral witnesses: in order to qualify as moral witness, their "testimonial mission has [to have] a moral purpose" (ibid: 151) and they have to take risks. "To be a moral witness … is all about taking risks" (ibid.: 157).

If an artist does take risks as an eye-witness, then she or he would seem to qualify as moral witness even though the production of art "for some future use" (ibid.: 150) appears to contradict Margalit's insistence on testimony's "intrinsic value", its non-instrumentality: in Margalit's understanding, testimony is not a means to an end. Indeed, the testimony of the paradigmatic moral witness is given "intrinsic value …, no matter what the instrumental consequences of it are going to be" (ibid.: 167). Thus, an artist documenting, with a moral purpose and for future use, the suffering of others at the same time that this very suffering occurs can, if – and only if – she or he takes risks, be a moral witness; however, due to both the lack of personal experience of suffering and the documentation's instrumentality, he or she cannot be a *paradigmatic* one.

Furthermore, Margalit differentiates the *moral* witness from the *political* witness who "believes that the incriminating evidence that she gathers is an instrument in the war effort" (ibid.). In light of the title of the present book, a longer quotation seems to be necessary here:

The political witness, by temperament and training, can be a much better witness than the mere moral witness for the structure of evil and not only for episodes of evil. And thus he can be a more valuable witness in uncovering the factual truth. The political witness can be very noble in fighting evil against all odds. And yet as an ideal type, although his features partly overlap with those of the moral witness, the political witness is still distinct, not to be confused with the moral witness. Both are engaged in uncovering what evil tries to cover up. The political witness may be more effective in uncovering the factual truth, in telling it like it was. But the moral witness is more valuable at telling it like it felt, that is, telling what it was like to be subjected to such evil. The first-person accounts of moral witnesses are essential to what they report, whereas political witnesses can testify from a third-person perspective without much loss (ibid.: 168).

The distinction between "telling it like it *was*" and "telling it like it *felt*" (ibid.; italics added) is an important one. It is equally important that there is overlap between the moral and the political witness; these two subject positions are not mutually exclusive. Margalit's understanding of "political witness", however, is a very specific one – one that the contributors to this volume do not necessarily share. While it has been said that art is political on condition that it "extends the thread of recognition and understanding beyond what previously was seen and known" (Elderfield 2006: 44), any work of art is susceptible to politically informed analysis. Such analysis will reveal, for example, that art is eminently political even if it confirms "what previously was seen and known" (ibid.). Indeed, art, while bearing witness to politics, lacks criticality if it mainly reconstructs or anticipates the motives of the political elite (Krippendorff 2000: 91). Such art is political but hardly critical (Möller 2016). Art, thus, is always a contribution to political discourse, shaping "what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought" (Rancière 2009: 103). In other words, art contributes to our understanding of what is possible, envisioning what Jacques Rancière calls "a new landscape of the possible" (ibid.) or rendering the emergence of such a new landscape difficult.

Bearing witness to politics through political analysis of art reveals as much about art as it does about the political constellations within which art operates. Neither art nor bearing witness to politics through art is necessarily or automatically critical or politically progressive. Political analysis can reveal whether it *is* or not. Such analysis, however, "should not … aim at the closure of 'interpretation' or 'analysis' of the work, but rather aim toward a dialogue wherein the work of art retains its power to challenge the preexisting theories, be they political, philosophical, or literary" (Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski 2008: 20). Thus, witnessing politics through art is always an ongoing project.

To resume our explication of Margalit's conceptualization we would like to stress that being a moral witness is linked to hope – hope "that in another place or another time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony" (Margalit 2004: 155). Applied to the artist as moralist, Alex Danchev (2009: 3) specifies that the artist hopes "that there is, or will be, an audience of sentient spectators, viewers, readers, absorbed in the work: a community, a moral community, for whom it stands up and who will stand up for it". Witnessing without a receptive audience appears futile.

#### **Time Witnesses**

A receptive audience is one that combines different temporalities of events, memories and experience. The question of the temporality of the witnessing poses the dilemma, whether or not the position of witnessing an event and artistically documenting it, for instance in war photography or other forms of witnessing violent activities, carries on throughout time, and how different temporalities of events, memories and experience are merged in the spectator.  The chapter discusses Chris Marker's work through selected examples of his films such as *Les Statues meurent aussi*, *Sans Soleil* and *Le Tombeau d'Alexandre*. Marker's aesthetic work is not only intertwined with rethinking cinematic political history and the philosophy of time. He also experiments with new technologies, with reproducing different aesthetic modes in order to narrate political and historical events. Marker's cinema has taken the form of personal essays, combined with the genre of documentary. Thus, as much as being an artist who documents different aspects of political history from the 1950s to the end of the millennium, he is also a personal witness of these times. His films are a combination of visual imagery with philosophical speculation and erudition. The commentaries he creates to accompany the filmimages come close to streams of consciousness and they can be very poetic. The poetry of the text combines with rather subjective seeing and hearing experiences. Besides the documentary film on Alexander Medvedkin (*Le Tombeau d'Alexandre*) that is discussed in this chapter, Marker has made several cinematic portraits, for instance on Akira Kurasawa, Christo, Andrei Tarkovsky and Simone Signoret.

Different temporalities of witnessing and the inter-connection among the artistic, the historical and the political are also thematised in Sally Butler and Roland Bleiker's contribution on indigenous art in Australia (chapter 5). Indigenous art is used worldwide to promote Australia; at the same time, however, its creators are politically, economically and socially marginalized in Australia, continually exposed to stigma and exclusion. This exclusion is also reflected in the extent to which the political dimension of indigenous art, including its emphasis on indigenous rights, self-determination and social equality, is often disregarded when this art is incorporated into mainstream culture and the art market. In the chapter, Butler and Bleiker direct our attention to performance and analyse the political witnessing function of performative role-playing aspects of art, utilised by indigenous artists in their fight against the colonial legacy, or, to use Derek Gregory's (2004) apt term, *the colonial present*. The authors' focus on embodiment and performance helps divert our attention from the visual ingredients of artistic witnessing to the body's full sensory network (see Bacci and Melcher 2013). Indeed, the visuality of witnessing cannot be reduced to that which can be seen but always involves the whole body, and this involvement transforms the eyewitness necessarily into the body-witness. Art employing the body – the body as art; the body as witness – testifies to the human condition under duress and influences the viewer's perception by means of subconscious sensory stimulations.

A recent popular British TV series (*Silent Witness*) helped popularize the *silent*, *post-mortem* witness.6 Roland Barthes (2000), too, identifies as the essence (or 'horror', as he notes) of the photograph that it certifies that the corpse is alive. Thus, the witnessing momentum here is that it maintains the memory, trace or images of the people who have passed away: this connects the historical witness to contemporary experience. Cynthia Milton, in her contribution to this volume, pays attention to art after loss (chapter 6). Milton analyses post-conflict representations of the violence visited upon Peru, especially its indigenous population, in connection with the conflict between state security forces and *Sendero Luminoso* (Shining Path) in the 1980s and 1990s. She engages with art's capability of contesting large-scale violence and restoring the humanity of citizens who suffered – and in case of traumatic memories, continue to suffer – from this violence. Milton not only explores the connection between art and affect; she also critically discusses the notion of art as historical evidence, noting that art can contradict official histories and represent individual and group memories that deviate from such histories. Importantly, Milton notes that "*art is not bound to truth"*, i.e. the issue is not – or not primarily or exclusively – one of verisimilitude in the sense of being true or real. Rather, art interrogates competing narratives of the past, acknowledging both that each narrative may be true from the perspective of the narrator (as people remember the same event differently) and that no narrative is true (in the sense of historically accurate). Memory is always exposed to and influenced by narrative structures of other memories; and all memories evolve, especially when narrated in form of a story (see also Levi 1989: 24).

*Post-mortem* witnesses also appear in connection with forensic photography (see Dufour 2015) in such contexts as the (reappearance of the) *desaparecidos* – the disappeared (Sánchez 2011a and 2011b). The dead are not "required to make sense of their deaths", as Jim Crace (2000: 192) poignantly writes, but their remains can help others explain and, to some extent, cope with these deaths – bones are "the most reliable witnesses to atrocity" (Danchev 2009: 41). Forensic photography may not be capable of providing closure (Sánchez 2012:

6 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007y6k8/episodes/guide.

192). In contrast to other forms of photography,7 however, it may provide assurance.

The *post-factum* witness depicts "the space in which [the trauma] occurred" after it occurred (Lowe 2014: 228). Aftermath photographs and photographers, thus, are post-factum witnesses. This photography and these photographers focus either on people experiencing and suffering from trauma even when the event that caused the trauma in the first place seems to be over (e.g. Torgovnik 2009) or on landscapes, built environment and ruins within which traumacausing events occurred and which testify to such events (Lisle 2011). Aftermath artists may engage with an event that occurred before they were born – in which case they may be referred to as *secondary* witnesses (Apel 2002) or *post*-witnesses (Popescu and Schult 2015), a term derived from Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory8 – or they may recreate an event they witnessed personally but did not artistically engage with at the time it happened.

A photographer can be a *convincing* witness if he or she uses "lenses that approximate the breadth and magnification of average human vision" so as to "neutralize our skepticism" (Adams 1994: 147) and thwart allegations of manipulation which are omnipresent in the digital age. However, photography can also appear to be convincing if it operates fundamentally differently. Referring to the satellite images then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell used in his testimony before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, Jane Blocker introduces the *invisible* witness. According to Blocker, such a witness is a core character in current cultural configurations because "the godlike invisibility of this witness lends it a legitimacy and authority that allow it to control in alarming ways what we understand 'the real' to be" (Blocker 2009: xvi). Powell, however, seems to have been more sceptical about the power of this witness. In connection with selected images, he explicitly referred to "a human source" corroborating the visual evidence seemingly provided by the images: "So it's not just the photo, and it's not an individual seeing the photo. It's the photo and then the knowledge of an individual being brought together to make the case".9 One might ask: what case? Indeed, by combining image and eye-witness, Powell combined two notoriously unreliable sources. It is arguable that he did so in order to illustrate the US administration's pre-existing beliefs

7 Hirsch (1997: 119) notes that the photograph normally reveals less than it promises to reveal. 8 "Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by

narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither

understood nor recreated" (Hirsch 1997: 22). 9 US Secretary of State's address to the United Nations Security Council, February 5, 2003, at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/05/iraq.usa.

on Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a country in possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Artists engage in the politics of witnessing by utilizing all of the above – and many other – understandings of and approaches to being a witness. They are not the only ones. For example, "the role of the photographer as witness" is regularly referenced in the literature, especially in connection with photojournalistic representations of wars and violent conflicts (Kennedy 2014: 46). Louie Palu's contribution to this volume (chapter 2) shows why it is appropriate to refer to photojournalists as witnesses. Such photojournalists as Palu himself are eyewitnesses; they exemplify contemporaneity by being on location when something happens; and they take risks. Their work also follows strict ethical standards. They do not normally belong to the group of people originally targeted by the regime; however, as Palu's contribution shows, they become targets in their capacity as photographers, testifying visually to gruesome events for some future use. In his chapter, Palu also raises the important question of image control. Witnessing through art and visual culture reflects practices of control and selection. Palu asks: "*Who controls what you see?*" Who controls what you bear witness to? That witnessing through images is not always possible does not imply impossibility of witnessing through art, as several contributions to this volume show.

It is more intriguing, perhaps, that even soldiers are referred to as witnesses documenting, by means of smart phones, their own involvement in the politics of violence (Allan 2014: 187; see also Kennedy 2009 and Struck 2011). These witnesses document, perhaps, their own suffering but they also document the suffering they inflict on others. Can perpetrators be witnesses?

#### **The Artist as Witness**

Why does this book specifically engage with artists? After all, in many cases artists represent other people's experiences without having been invited or asked to do so; their work is not commissioned by those who it is meant to reference. Why, then, should artists be expected to be capable of representing other people's experiences adequately? Often they tell the story of things *not* "seen at close hand" (Levi) but from afar – temporally and spatially, lacking "knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering" (Margalit). Why, then, do artists believe that they have the right to represent other people's experiences in the first place? And who can judge the appropriateness of artistic representations beyond aesthetic judgments? Some commentators insist that what matters is not the truth of the artist but, rather, "the truth of the 'victim'" (Roberts 2014: 150) but is there any guarantee that artists are capable of grasping the victim's truth? If not, do they exert violence upon the victims by disregarding their, the victims', truth? Aesthetic judgments would ultimately be of only secondary importance in the context of art as a political witness where judgments have to be political, not aesthetic, ones.

For example, a purely aesthetic judgment of the photographs Dorothea Lange and other photographers produced while on assignment with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) would be misleading. As Jay Prosser notes, underlying their photographic work was a political mission, disguised to some extent by the seemingly documentary character of the photographs. While appearing to be a documentary "mode of witnessing", this photography "did not *portray* victims …; it *created* them" so as to help gain support for the US administration's resettlement policy (Prosser 2005: 90; italics added). The photographer's "non-neutrality" (ibid.) may explain the success of their photographs but their work cannot adequately be grasped with exclusive reference to being a witness.

This photography can also be referenced to illustrate the occasionally rather problematic relationship between artists and subjects, much discussed in the existing literature. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites report that one of the subjects of one of the most famous photographs produced in connection with the work of the FSA, Florence Thompson, later complained about the "commodification of her image that completely divorced the woman in the photograph from the living Thompson" (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 62) and her reduction in public perception to a *Migrant Mother*. We note the publisher's striking insensitivity when reproducing this very photograph on the cover of the book, thus contributing to the very same commodification and exploitation Hariman and Lucaites so eloquently describe in their book.

If we follow Walter Benjamin's notion in discussing the complexity of artistic representations, we would notify that beauty, thus the aesthetic value per se, is included in the secrecy (*Geheimnis*) of the work, but not necessarily in its presentation. Beauty includes the possibility that it be recovered in the moment of critique (Benjamin 1991 [1922]: 196). In the moment at which the illusion that the aura represents is becoming transparent the work might also appear differently in its perception. Benjamin positions himself in relation to the Platonic idea of art as illumination and Heidegger's idea of beauty that is connected to being and truth.10 In his *Work of Art* essay, originally from the year 1936, Benjamin plays with the double meaning of *illumination*, as it is formed from the illusion towards presentation. Here, Benjamin also emphasises the

10 Heidegger's idea is presented in *Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes* (1960, originally from 1935).

aesthetic polarity of the concepts of play and illumination (*Spiel und Schein*) in which the idea of the origin as truth has already disappeared.

For Benjamin, play and illumination are both included in the concept of *mimesis* (Benjamin 1991 [1936]: 668). The decay of the ancient idea of creation is to be found in the mimesis itself, which is understood as the *original phenomenon*  of all artistic creation. What the imitation (the work of art) does to the subject imitated occurs only in an illusory way, like in a play (ibid.: 368). Benjamin suggests that the definition of art should find a balance between these two extreme ways of interpretation; Schiller stresses the importance of play (*Spiel*), Goethe stresses illumination in aesthetics (ibid.: 667). It is possible that a balance between these two could be found. The rethinking of art in the modern era allows the work of art to be conceived of in a way in which play (*Spiel*) and illumination are brought together, and in which art not only imitates the surrounding world, but also begins to *imitate itself* as copies are reproduced. This viewpoint also has its effects when we think in more contemporary terms, about how and in what ways art can be a witness. Thus, what is art actually witnessing in these terms? Is it the play of, illumination of or mimetic experiences of the events and their witness?

For instance, Martin Seel remarks upon the importance of Benjamin's idea in overcoming traditional philosophies of aesthetics (Seel 1993: 771–773). The idea to which Benjamin's thought leads is that here, art is not conceived of as the presentation of something else, such as 'reality' or 'truth', but is *understood as the presentation itself.* Here, presentation is actually the idea that connects to the witness: art has (or might have) the capacity to be a witness in the very act of its presentation.

Wieviorka (2006: 101) notes, in connection with the television mini-series *Holocaust,* anxiety among survivors that they might be "dispossessed of [their own] history by someone outside the experience who claims to be telling it". This someone could be, and often is, an artist. And Jill Bennett reminds us that the experience of violence – or, for that matter, the experience of anything else – "is fundamentally *owned* by someone" (Bennett 2005: 3; italics added). Artists' attempts to speak on someone's behalf and to represent someone's experiences – someone marginalized, someone silenced, someone misrepresented in official discourse or mass culture, someone victimized, even someone killed11 – might amount to expropriation of such ownership and dispossession of survivors' intimate stories and memories. If artists engage with someone else's experience from the outside by, for example, showing up on location after the event, they

<sup>11</sup> Wieviorka (2006: 101) reports that "one of the recurring themes in both oral and written survivor testimony is of a promise made to a friend or relative who is about to die, a promise to tell the world what happened to them and thus to save them from oblivion – to make death a little less futile. Survival itself is often explained and justified by this will to honor the legacy of those who perished".

enter the "event-as-aftermath" (Roberts 2014: 107), thus contributing to its discursive reconstruction (see below). In other cases, artists are themselves survivors. Rather than engaging with someone else's experience from the outside, they are themselves inside the experience they engage with. Like Edilberto Jiménez in Milton's chapter and Chris Marker in Lindroos's chapter, they are artists *and* they are eyewitnesses.

Representation necessarily transforms. It may give voice to people whose voice would otherwise remain inaudible. Indeed, the question of "who gets heard" is, "fundamentally, a political question" (Couldry 2000: 57). Furthermore, *giving voice* does not necessarily result in *getting heard* in any substantial sense. Often, however, it is the artist's voice we hear, not the voice of the people the artist claims to represent. This problem can be observed not only in connection with the work of artists but also in connection with the work of scholars, treating victims' testimonies as mere *data* with which to produce knowledge. Tensions occur even in those cases where no open conflict can be observed between individual memories and personal truths on the one hand and academic discourse and knowledge production on the other (Wieviorka 2006: 128–132).

Artists may speak on behalf of others – others who cannot themselves speak or who do not have access to channels of communication. However, artists may also try to give voice to people who would prefer *not* to speak, perhaps because they want to avoid "being trapped in an image in which one does not quite recognize oneself" (ibid.: 140) and to which one does not want to be reduced – the image of a witness, a victim, a survivor, a 'migrant mother' (see above). In any case, regardless of *Photovoice* and many other participatory and photo elicitation projects (Harper 2012: 155–206; Delgado 2015), ours are still "societies and cultures where individuals are spoken *for*, much more than they speak in their own name – and they are not necessarily spoken for accurately" (Couldry 2000: 58).

However, the issue is not primarily one of accurateness. Indeed, as Bennett explains, it is not at all a question of "faithful translation of testimony" but rather a question of art "exploit[ing] its own unique capacities to contribute actively" to what she calls "a politics of testimony" (Bennett 2005: 3). It is art's unique capacities to serve as a political witness that this book is interested in exploring.

#### **The Politics of Witnessing**

In the context of being an eyewitness, Susan Sontag has extensively reflected on the ways in which the *camera* is a part of witnessing. In particular, she notes, photography has captured the moments that remain parts of our memories of the vanished past and the departed: keeping company with death (Sontag 2003: 24). Quoting Virginia Woolf's *Three Guineas* (1938), Sontag notices that photographs are not arguments; rather, they are "a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye" (ibid.: 26). (The facticity of photographic statements has, however, been controversially discussed in photographic discourses, establishing that a photographic representation is never identical with the 'fact' it seems to represent.) The brain registers as memory the connection between the photograph and a certain kind of testimony experienced through the eye and in the human nervous system. The memory also becomes a moment that connects present and past times. Thus, the photograph as a 'witness' is also a temporal witness.

Sontag's discussions of Holocaust photography are well-known and often referred to. However, she also pays attention to war photography, including differences between the eras that are being documented. Sontag claims that we are living "in a world saturated, no, hyper-saturated with images" (ibid.: 105), but that not all wars are documented equally; for instance, the long civil war in Sudan, the Iraqi campaigns against the Kurds or the Russian invasion of Chechnya are relatively under-photographed (ibid.: 37). Similarly, Rancière (2009: 96) has directed our attention to processes of selection in connection with the publication of images of violent conflict and human suffering indicating that, while we may be over-exposed to images of some conflicts, other conflicts may very well be invisible to the public. This assessment, in tandem with Sontag's claim (2003: 89) that people "remember only the photographs", raises the question of how to witness conflicts that cannot be seen. In this volume, several contributors pay attention to forms of artistic witnessing other than narrowly visual ones (poetry, literature, dance, theatre and performance).

The dilemma is that although it is problematic to trust media images and war photography as witnesses of certain conflicts and political events, the lack of images documenting a particular conflict affects our understanding of the significance of that conflict and the human suffering it engenders. It also facilitates the politicization of images, as discussed by Bruno Lefort in chapter 7. Lefort explores the "politics of fear" in a 2013 short film that appeared on the Internet to commemorate the 2006 looting of the Danish Embassy in Achrafiyeh, the heartland of Christian Beirut, Lebanon, following the publication of the Prophet cartoons in a Danish newspaper. The video plays on various temporalities – dis-articulating events to re-articulate them in a predefined chain of meaning – so as to stage a memory of communal violence and fear.

Lefort discusses how this representation is enunciated around the tropes of territorial invasion and struggle for survival, embodied by the continual evocation of Martyrs (*shuhadâ'*) whose meaning is to testify (*shahada*) the validity of the experience of intergroup violence conveyed in the film. Further, he argues that the film calls upon a political unconscious to activate an affectivity of communion addressed to the Lebanese Christians. Indeed, the images work as witnesses of their past suffering, of the memory of their internal strife, and of their precarious common fate in a region politically dominated by Islam. Conceivably labelled as political propaganda, this representation ultimately sustains a present day actualization of politics as factionalism: it witnesses the composition and mediation of an alleged resilient existential confrontation between everlasting identities.

Video (from the Latin *videre*, to see) combines both meanings of being a witness – testifying and seeing (see below) – and invites a double act of witnessing: video, as a "social act […] asks that we bear witness to its act of witness" (Saltzman 2006: 30). Photography is said to be uniquely qualified among the visual arts to contribute "to the pathetic understanding of an *other*" (Thompson 2013: 78). "Pathetic" here refers to *pathema* – "an experience passively received: acquiescence to what is seen" (ibid.: 14) – but is the experience of looking at a photograph entirely a passive one? Film and photography are capable of visualizing "the commonalities of being human" (MacDougall 1998: 246). By so doing, they may interrupt stereotypical constructions of 'us' and 'them' evoked in processes of witnessing and help viewers *empathetically* but *partially* identify with the people and the conditions depicted in film and photography – 'empathetically' because "*feeling for* another … entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible" (Bennett 2005: 10) and 'partially' because one's own *mediated* perception of an other's experience is necessarily different from the other's *personal* experience and should not be identified with it. In photographer Diane Arbus's laconic words (quoted in Dyer 2005: 47): "somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own". You can *feel for* an other but you can neither be this other nor feel what the other feels. Art can evoke this *feeling for*.

Poetry "is the most explicit engagement with the very essence of who we are and what we do: language" (Bleiker 2009: 4). Poetry, thus, can be seen not only as a witness of certain events but also, as Tommi Kotonen shows in his contribution, as a witness to the language with which these events get constructed. In chapter 8, Kotonen analyses different linguistic tools and theories on language and communication that Charles Bernstein brings to the play when trying to register and deconstruct US-American politics and mythology after 9/11. Indeed, the question of language – "where does one testify from, and what does one testify to?" (Wieviorka 2006: 32) – is as crucial in the context of political witnessing as is the question of what language one uses when testifying. American poet Charles Bernstein was coming back from LaGuardia airport on September 11, 2001. He was one of the millions who witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center. During and after that day he wrote several poems where he reflected on the mood in Manhattan, and pondered hate and differing personal and political reactions. As one of the socalled *language poets*, Bernstein has for his entire career been opposing the presence of the lyric, first-person voice in poetry. When 9/11 unfolds in front of his very eyes, he becomes an unwilling "witness to the unspeakable" (Kotonen, in this volume), to events which also affect his poetry. In his first poems after the attack a witnessing poetical 'I' providing personal knowledge is present. The rest of the collection can be seen as a commentary to this 'I' and his reflections; a commentary that refuses to impose a singular 'I' as a connecting element but instead dwells on insecurities and ambivalences, and tries to talk with no 'voice'. From the first reactions, and from their prosaic poetry to more distanced, formalistic pieces, Bernstein deciphered the events and their politics and, in the end, the reader, too, becomes one of the witnesses.

The concept of being a witness, traditionally connected with "public recognition of atrocities" (Kaplan 2005: 122), is increasingly decoupled from tragic events and applied to the everyday: people *witness* a football match rather than *watching* or *attending* it. This application is in accordance with another dictionary entry defining witness, in "loose writing", as "a synonym of 'see'."12 A certain trivialization of our understanding of being a witness may follow. However, this tendency can be valued positively as an indicator of the increasing appreciation in public and academic discourse of the everyday lives and everyday experiences of ordinary people (Sheringham 2006). These experiences, while often decoupled from tragic and traumatic events, are important to people's sense of place and identity. The "temporality of the everyday" can be, and has been, represented in artistic work, including work by such photographers as Robert Capa, which is often reduced to representations of "the everyday overturned" (Dell 2010: 46).

An 'everyday' witnessing might also happen in unexpected spaces. In her chapter, Suvi Alt reflects the role of abandoned places that have received increasingly popular and academic interest during the past decade (chapter 9). Drawing on research that examines the ways in which derelict spaces enable contestation of capitalism and power, Alt combines an auto-ethnographic account of visits to several abandoned sites with a theoretical elaboration of

<sup>12</sup> *The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of Historical Principles*, Vol. II, p. 2563 (all quotations).

Giorgio Agamben's concepts of 'witnessing' and 'play'. In discussing 'urban exploration' as a practice of bearing witness to and playing with abandoned places, she deploys a notion of *onto-poetics* as a site of transformation connecting poetics, life and the political. *Onto-poetics* draws on a Heideggerian conception of art, which does not prioritise a preference for the aesthetic, but refers to the happening of being, and which is here understood as opening up a new space for politics. In this chapter, a twofold political argumentation is searched for. First, Alt argues that urban exploration is a practice of witnessing the past in the present, yet not in the form of recounting an event as a result of having been present as a spectator, but in the form of listening to absence through the materiality of the site. The second argument is that urban exploration is a free and common use of the order of places and identities: a playing with and using what used to be sacred. The *onto-poetics of abandoned places* lies in the ruins' potential to effect change in the way in which one conceives of life as well as one's environment beyond the ruin.

Being a witness is also disconnected from a given person who is a witness. Time periods appear as witnesses: the 1970s and early 1980s, for example, are said to have "witnessed an extraordinary craze for ethnological 'life stories'" (Wieviorka 2006: 97). Material objects such as photographs can also be witnesses. Ariella Azoulay, for example, notes that it is not a person who is doing the witnessing but a photograph: pictures "witness the moment of the outbreak of disaster" (Azoulay 2014: 129). Paul Lowe (2014: 213) refers to photographs as "social agents … bearing witness to past events". He explores "the possibility that the act of bearing witness to past atrocities can be located in the photograph itself, rather than in the photographer". Here, the photograph appears as "secondary witnessing", an "independent artefact in and of itself as well as serving as the visual testimony of the photographer" (ibid.). Both, then, the photographer and her photograph are witnesses, inextricably linked with one another but simultaneously separate from one another, both serving as social agents. Monuments, quintessential vehicles through which and with which people collectively remember, can be witnesses, too, as Lisa Saltzman (2006: 25–47) shows in her discussion of Krzysztof Wodiczko's work.

The concept of witnessing is also separated from presence on location when something happens. This is probably the biggest step away from the traditional understanding of being a witness, requiring, in one form or another, presence: contemporaneity. Photography, Sean O'Hagan (2015) writes in a review of a Jeff Wall exhibition, is seemingly "an act of instant witnessing". Wall's work, however, remakes something from memory – something that lingers in the photographer. Wall does not photograph something instantaneously but recreates it later from memory, insisting on "imaginative freedom" (Wall) as being "crucial to the making of art" (O'Hagan 2015). Recreating from memory amounts to the creation of something new that is linked with, but simultaneously decoupled from, the witnessed event, as memories invariably change over time. Wall's work, then, testifies to the artist's memory at a given point in time of a given event, not to the particular event.

Aftermath, post-factum and secondary witnessing all call into question the formerly defining identification of (eye-)witnessing with being personally on location when something, usually something tragic or unexpected, happens. Artists often arrive on location only after an event; they – and their works of art – nevertheless witness not only the aftermath of this event but also the original event. They witness – and reconstruct – "the event-as-aftermath" (Roberts 2014: 107). Recipients of these artworks also become witnesses, *distant* witnesses, remote in space and time, not only of the work of art and that which it represents – the aftermath – but also of the original event referenced in the artwork. Thus, testimony can be transferred from one person to another, transforming, for example, the beholder of an image or the observer of a theatre play that witnesses the *aftermath* of an event into a witness of the *original* event.

Combining the above observations with Butler and Bleiker's focus on the body, Susanna Hast's chapter elaborates on war experience: on the ways in which such experience touches us and we are touched by it (chapter 10). For Hast, 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 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.

#### **References**

*Volume 1: The History*. New York: International Center of Photography/Göttingen: Steidl, pp. 37–49.

## **2. Image Control in the Age of Terror**

#### **Louie Palu**

The act of witnessing war, violence, documenting them and for what purpose any resulting photographs are used for can determine the outcome of political understanding and decisions on every level affecting a war.1 For example most if not all high-level politicians and civilian diplomats representing countries with western soldiers fighting in Kandahar, Afghanistan where I worked between 2006 and 2010 relied on series of witnesses for their understanding of the conflict. These civilians and policy makers were not allowed beyond a certain sized secure military base cut off from the communities they might be located in. This resulted furthermore in most civilian employees of any government not being permitted anywhere near the true frontlines where their policies may count most because of the high risk of them being targeted by opposing forces. Terrorists and militants in many areas attempt attacking any representative of a foreign government for the high propaganda value some insurgent groups placed on killing western civilians especially representing governments such as the United States and Canada. In addition, they were not allowed on patrols or out on combat operations with soldiers. They relied on journalist's and soldier's interpretations and reports on what the war looked and sounded like. The situation on the ground in the war was interpreted for them using still photographs, writing and including some video. However, even the witness is limited by what they can convey by these methods of documentation and representation as details such as the smell of war which includes dead bodies and what all the senses experience including the weather can never be documented as real as the an in person experience.

<sup>1</sup> This essay is derived from a series of lectures on the relationship between editing and censorship in war photography. The lectures were delivered from 2014-2016 at George Mason University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Toronto, the Center of Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the *Ethics of Storytelling* conference hosted by Turku University in Finland.

*Fig. 2.1*: Screen capture still photograph from video made by the Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan as it appears in Louie Palu's documentary "Kandahar Journals" (76 minutes 2015). 2015 Photo © Louie Palu

Current conflicts like those that involve ISIS (aka ISIL) have become near impossible to photograph by journalists and include environments much too hostile to work in as an independent witness, as ISIS has made it their message within their videos to perform grotesque killings of members of the western media and create their own content. It is now the sophisticated manner in which militant groups such as ISIS create visual content and control what is visually documented that has changed the manner in which we see and don't see what is going on in the world's new battlefields.

When I see a photograph, the first thing I do is figure out who took it. But the name of the person who pressed the shutter button is just the first stem: for what purpose was the photograph taken? In printed newspapers and magazines, the photographer's byline is often more discrete than that of the author of a news article the photograph accompanies. The photographer is identified by fine print in the margin of the page. Next, I turn to the caption: the *who, what, when, where, why and how* of the image as described there is critical to understanding the photograph as a photograph.

In the years dominated by the printed page, the photograph, its caption if any and the credit were printed on the same sheet of paper. They were inseparable. In the digital age, images are embedded online in social media apps without credit or caption Authorship and context are stripped away, and the viewer is left to make assumptions. Most of the students whom I have spoken to who have come of age in the internet era say they do not look for the author of the photograph or for its caption.

*Fig. 2.2*: Screen capture still photograph from video made by ISIS of the murder of American Journalist James Foley in 2014.

When photographs are presented as digital files, they are often downloaded without the text containing the photographer's credit. This has a long-term cost. Archives, libraries and schools end up with photographs whose provenance is lost to time. This exacerbates the long-time practice of newspaper copy editors, who often replace the caption a photographer writes with quotes from the story the photograph accompanies, always over the photographer's objections. Now many images on social media photographs have no text accompanying the context of the image, they are there to simply "illustrate" the story.

Though non-professional bystanders can sometimes take images that are inarguably newsworthy, this does not, in my view, make them journalists. I've always had a problem with the term "citizen journalist". As a working journalist, I've always followed a code of ethics that, among other things, calls for independence and impartiality.2 Professional journalists may fall short of ethical aspirations, but they consider the impact of their images in a way that amateurs might not.

2 I follow the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics, which can be found online at https:/nppa.org/code\_of\_ethics.

This became clear to me when covering the drug war in Mexico between 2011 and 2013. I came to the realization that all parties with a vested interest in a war zone utilize photography to control what can be seen. Independent witnesses like myself vie over audiences and views of the war. In one month in Mexico, I covered over 100 murders in two cities: Ciudad Juarez and Culiacan. I also spent months of fieldwork covering drug addiction, mental health, and the daily life of Mexicans and Americans affected by the drug war.

First, there were members of the Mexican and American government and business community I spoke to who felt that dwelling on the conflict gave a distorted view and painted a negative image of Mexico—images of thousands of murdered Mexicans in the news didn't adequately reflect the complexity of reality, in their view. The rise of Mexico's middle class, for instance, was neglected. Then there were many people on both sides of the border I spoke to who gave an opposite view: every person murdered should be shown in the news, so that the people responsible for their deaths—including those in government—could be held accountable. It became very difficult to reconcile these views when working in the field. How much time should I spend covering murders?  The Government or Corporate Handout*

A photograph created and released for free use by the media taken by a photographer working for the government, special interest group such as a agricultural association, or a corporation. These images usually gave an image that painted the government in a positive light or of them arresting criminals and capturing weapons and drugs. The Mexican economy and tourism also figured quite prominently in the high number of images that dominated the conversation away from the drug war.

#### *2. The Photojournalist*

Photographs made following straightforward journalistic practices, which in most cases are associated with news media outlets such as Reuters, the Associated Press, or numerous Mexican news outlets. Many organized crime groups found some of the coverage negative and revealed some of their activities resulting over the years in the murder of numerous journalists in Mexico. In some areas of Mexico, such as the state of Tamaulipas, news photography of anything drug-related was and remains impossible.

#### *3.  Some photographs have been taken by police officers or soldiers, or by individuals who simply arrive at the murder scene before the authorities and take a picture with a mobile phone. Some sites have writing; some don't. Some combine their own content, while others mix it or copy and paste the work of professional journalists with theirs. Many individuals who operate these sites use pseudonyms, due to the level of violence and threat against the lives of journalists in Mexico. Many of the images I have seen from these sources are very graphic, usually too gruesome to publish and have no credit or context to the photograph. One such blog I followed is *Borderland Beat*. It was useful for me, but also very unreliable, because I never knew who had taken the photographs they were showing or why.

#### *4. Organized Crime Groups and Drug Cartels*

Narcotraffickers follow in the tradition as many armed groups in the past such as the Irish Republican Army in using photography and video to communicate their ideas and to project their message and power. However, the *Narcos* have developed the use of something unique called a *Narcomanta*, which is usually a large sheet or banner with their message painted or printed on it, hung in a public place. This is a new development. Narcomantas are generally only text – a photograph isn't printed on the banner.

*Narcomantas* have two lives – the first in the world where they hang, and the second when they are photographed by news photographers or the public, and circulate again, as a photograph of a set up scene with a written message made to be photographed. Sometimes *narcomantas* are laid on top of bodies, or in some cases affixed to a fence or wall above piles of bodies or body parts. They typically have written messages against competing cartels or government figures. This practice has to some extent replaced the traditional use of graffiti by street gangs or organized crime.

Whereas graffiti was location specific, Narcomantas can be placed anywhere to suit the message or amount of people walking or driving down a road to see it.

*Fig. 2.3*: "Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of Military Police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during in-processing to the temporary detention facility on Jan. 11, 2002". DoD photo by Petty Officer 1st class Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy.

Drug traffickers are not only killing photojournalists, but they are competing with them in trying to dominate what the public does or does not see through the use of visual devices.

Narcomantas are not sophisticated in their production values. Their force, such as it is, comes from the stark brutality of the message they convey. But other groups, such as Islamic terrorists in the Mideast, ISIS/ISIL in particular, have also coopted the techniques of photo and video journalists. The videos ISIS creates of executions use traditional and classical forms of composition, color and design. They use filters, silhouettes, lighting and romanticized scenes where the militants perform for the camera to spread their ideology. They took the orange jumpsuit first used by the American military and used it to clothe hostages. Many of their videos are so brutal that screen captures of less graphic segments of their videos are created as still photographs by news media for publishing.

The first photograph I ever saw of detainees from Guantanamo Bay was of a group of detainees in orange jumpsuits with U.S. soldiers standing over them in a fenced off area. The first time I remember seeing an image (which was a frame capture as a still photograph from a video) of a member of ISIS acted as an aesthetic mirror to the Guantanamo image but in reverse as an image with a American journalist in an orange jumpsuit on his knees and a member of ISIS standing over them before killing him. The photograph as a symbol of power and the color orange have been used as a visual response to the U.S. Government's hand out photograph. I have been to the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay where the infamous detention center is based several times on media tours organized by the U.S. Department of Defense. The manner in which photographs are taken is highly controlled. In response to this I created a concept publication, one which I have shared with numerous students in classrooms as an exercise in image control, censorship and editing. As an ongoing exploration of the subject of image control I wrote the following instructions on the rear of publication for any students who interact with the publication:

*GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review is a concept publication; it has no headlines, competing articles or advertising. It is an editing project, which uses photographs taken by Louie Palu at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay where detainees captured after the attacks of September 11, 2001 are being held. These photographs were taken while on several media tours organized by the U.S. Department of Defense between 2007-2010. The tours and access to take photographs is strictly managed and controlled by U.S. military officials. Photographs can only be taken with a digital camera.*

*At the end of each day of photography at the detention center, an official from the U.S. Department of Defense conducts an "Operational Security Review". This is a process in which digital photographs deemed to have classified content or imagery that does not follow the guidelines for media coverage of the detention center are deleted from the photographer's memory cards. The only traces that remain of the deleted images are file numbers listed on an official Department of Defense form given to the photographer. These forms have also been included in this publication. This publication can be dismantled and re-edited to your view of what you think the story should look like. It is also an exhibition that can be displayed anywhere you choose without the formality of a gallery or museum.*

*GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review is the second publication in a series exploring image control in the media. The first, "Mira Mexico", examines the Mexican drug war and the optics of drug-related violence. The goal of both projects is to position the*  *user/viewer as editor, curator or censor. The central question of this project is, "who controls what you see?"*

The response by many of the students who have attended my lecture and participate in this exercise in editing the *GUANTANAMO Operational Security Review* concept newspaper always respond with shock and sometimes anger when they read about the deleting of images after every day of photography. However, what I ask them and what I confronted myself about is we all control what people see and don't see even in journalism.

In my profession as a photojournalist, we edit photographs. I might take 500 photographs on an assignment and only select 15 of them to submit to my editor at a newspaper, which publishes one of them. What happens to the 499 images the newspaper didn't print? How is the newspaper's process of selection distinct from the government censors?

We have entered an age where learning visual literacy is as important an exercise as it is to read words.  Learning to understand who produced them and for what purpose is more crucial than ever as people's ideas of what is real and what is not. Photographs influence how we think about this world socially and politically. So the question I constantly ask myself and try to imagine is what are we are and are not seeing and or understanding in this new world visual order?3

<sup>3</sup> Editors' note: for a sample of Louie Palu's work, see the plate section (plates 1–9).

## **3. The Body Remembers: Dance, Discourses of Citizenship, Phenomenology and Memory**

#### **Dana Mills**

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

ȥ Jeanette Winterson, *Written on the Body*

Now the world of nature is to be expressed in symbols; a new world of symbols is necessary, a symbolism of the body for once, not just the symbolism of the mouth, but the full gestures of dance, the rhythmic movement of all the limbs.

ȥ Friedrich Nietzsche, *the Birth of Tragedy*

To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.

ȥ Martha Graham

This chapter will look at the specific way through which dance, as an embodied art, carries memory and inscribes it on the bodies of spectators and performers. The chapter argues that dance is an embodied way of witnessing memory. Through the conceptual lens of discourses of citizenship it will discuss the changes in the relationship between Israel and Germany,1 and the witnessing of the holocaust, from the 1970s till nowadays, as they are reflected in three dance works. It will argue that Israel has shifted from an essentially republican discourse of citizenship towards a liberal discourse, that that this discursive shift has affected the perception of the Israeli- German relationship and its perception in the Israeli society. In the 1970s, the common good was central to the discursive dynamics, and the remains of the state- building process were

<sup>1</sup> Whereas the focus here, for the sake of conceptual clarity, is on the significance of the holocaust for Israeli identity as narrated through discourses of citizenship, I draw the chapter to a close while reflecting on the consequences of the offered account for memory in Israeli identity more broadly.

intermeshed in the citizenship discourse. The 1990s saw a shift towards individualism, influenced by globalization and economic liberalization. The conceptual dynamics change from creating a discourse to its deconstruction. This decade marks a search for a new discourse which will go beyond these two discourses always in contest with each other. At the same time, the use of the term citizenship discourse enables a fluid, multi-layered conception of citizenship. The relationship between the body and conception of citizenship is never single layered and linear. Finally, the chapter will offer a phenomenological account of memory in motion; representing the unrepresentable; pain and trauma. The methodology of the chapter intertwines conceptual accounts borrowed from comparative government; methods of interpretation invested in dance studies; and ultimately, a philosophicalphenomenological account. The core assumption underlying this chapter is that in order to understand dance as an art-form witnessing political turbulence one must expand the prism of investigation and go beyond linear, single-faceted method and ideas.

#### **Conceptual Framework: Discourses of Citizenship**

The term *citizenship discourse* draws on the assumption that citizenship is not a monolithic entity, and its internal dynamics provide a vista into the dynamics of the polity. It assumes that the concept of citizenship is rooted in movement, thus cannot be wholly captured in static concepts. Citizenship discourses are moulded and mould their underlying social processes hence capture the neverending dynamicity of these processes. Consequently, any lived experiences narrated through the concept of citizenship should be registered and analysed through manifold discourses, exemplifying and exhibiting its multifarious nature. Hence this conceptual framework would be sympathetic to communicative articulations that cannot be consolidated in language, such as dance. Thus the chapter offers a political account of the transitions of the perception of memory in Israeli society and yields a philosophical account of what dance can offer the conception of art as a witness.

Michel Foucault (1991: 83) famously wrote that "the body is the inscribed surface of events". Language can be written on the body; language is inscribed on the body. Language cannot be understood merely as verbal communication; it is any method by which human beings register constitutive events of their lives; further, it is any method by which they communicate those events to others. The body is not a one dimensional entity. It is a symbolic web of meanings which create intersections and conflicts; it enables methods of signification to become intertwined but also to struggle over power of inscription. The body, as understood through dance, hence, is not only the surface upon which discourse writes; it is also the mechanism of inscription.2 Thus I see dance, throughout the chapter, as an art form that provides both the mechanism of inscription, the body, with its power; and the material upon which this mechanism of inscription writes. This duality of the body as witness will be teased out throughout and elaborated in the conclusion of the chapter.

Rogers Smith discusses the political dynamic of language in a specific conceptual understanding, that of a *discourse of citizenship.* This conception distances the concept of citizenship from a cohesive, linear and onedimensional interpretation and supplies it with theoretical vibrancy. The way human beings understand themselves as citizens enables multiple interpretations that can either act in tandem with each other or contradict each other, in different moments in time. Smith argued that the American concept of citizenship is formed of different discourses creating internal dynamics. Smith uses this argument to shift the focus from the discourses to the power relations that make them appear as they do. He discusses three competing interpretations of American citizenship: Liberal, Republican and Ethno-cultural. These interpretations were part of the American founding moment yet the dynamics between them shift and change. The liberal discourse of citizenship draws on ideas of the enlightenment, and its core characteristic is its emphasis on the space that the state should grant for fulfilment of private needs in addition to contributing towards common projects. People are conceptualized as free, independent and equal. The government role is to protect man's life, liberty and property. The state exists in order to serve the needs and wants of the individual and provide security, both physical and metaphysical. The American Republican discourse of citizenship follows the re-interpretation of Rousseau and Aristotle, especially in the thought of Thomas Jefferson. The focus is on institutions which are aimed at acquiring and securing the common good. The individual gains its being and importance from his or her participation in political institutions. The individual gains superior freedom by partaking in communal activities which enable him or her to become part of the body politics. The Ethno-cultural discourse of citizenship identifies the American identity with a certain ethno- cultural identity. The emphasis is on the ethnic community into which the individual is born, rather than either his other contribution to the collective or how the collective may serve him or her. His interpretation will seek the dominant ethic community which will be able to characterize its interpretation of citizenship as the superior one.

2 This conceptual approach is indebted to core works in dance theory which bring together dance and politics, and specifically Franko (1993 and 1995*)*, Martin (1998) and Lepecki (2006).

These three discourses place different concepts in their analytical limelight: the liberal discourse focuses on the individual; the Republican discourse focuses on the collective and its constitutive political institutions and how the individual may contribute to them; and the Ethno-cultural discourse focuses on the Ethnic community into which the individual is born. Thus, shifting power dynamics between those discourses of citizenship – which are multifaceted in themselves – also implies shift in conceptual focus and prism through which the concept of citizenship is viewed (Smith 1997: 6; 13–35). Israeli political scientists Shafir and Peled deconstructed this conceptual framework and used it to understand the particular dynamics of Israeli society. From here on, I the discussion will draw on their interpretation of this conceptualization of citizenship in the Israeli context (until the 1990s).

#### **Israeli Discourses of Citizenship**

Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled follow Smith when they discuss a possibility of multiple traditions of citizenship which are simultaneously part of social and political dynamics in one body politic. Once again, the analytical focus is on the *dynamics* between the different traditions rather than on the traditions *themselves*.

The liberal discourse of citizenship emphasizes freedom and private property as in this interpretation only the individual is a bearer of rights. The individual strives to fulfil his or her own good and does not owe anything to the community. According to the Republican discourse of citizenship, the moral community should cultivate the civic virtue as the centre of human existence and as the highest telos for human life .According to this interpretation, human beings gain their political importance from their participation in public life as well as their identification with its goals.

Hence whereas the Liberal discourse of citizenship focuses on sustaining and protecting the private sphere, the Republican discourse of citizenship will seek to demarcate spaces of participation and contribution to the common good. Shafir and Peled's historical assumption is that Israel was founded with a discursive dominance of the Republican discourse, striving to constitute a perception of the common good. The contestation of the centrality of the Republican discourse and the call for liberalization of the Israeli society came out of the labour party in 1965, when a sub-movement was formed by David Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres. Due to the flourishing that followed the Six Day War in 1967 the demands for liberalization were quieted till after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 that ended this period of economic growth. At this point, the Republican discourse became less central to the Israeli concept of citizenship and the Liberal and Ethno- Cultural discourses of citizenship competed for power over discursive dynamics.

The Liberal discourse in particular became much more noticeable in Israeli discursive dynamics in the 1990s. The peak of instability and fragmentation in the conceptualization of citizenship around that era was in 1995, following Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. The liberalization of the Israeli society drew on increasing Globalization and the Liberal discourse legitimized itself in the aim to integrate Israel into the international economy. The first attempt for liberalization of the Israeli market can be traced back to 1985 and this process is deepening till this day. From the 1930s till mid 1970s of the twentieth century the ideological centrality of the Labour movement in Israeli public life influenced the discursive dynamics in Israel. Up until the mid 1970s, the discourse of citizenship evolved around the collective and the ways thorough which individuals can contribute towards it, from the mid 1970s the discourse focuses on the individual and the societal and political implications of public participation for him or her. Accordingly, the public dynamics move towards satisfaction of the needs of the individual rather than the individual submitting itself for the needs of the polity (Shafir and Peled 2002: 16–23).

After tracing these discursive dynamics, I would like to proceed to the dance works which will be discussed in this paper and their manifestation of these dynamics and the implications that may be drawn concerning the relationship between Israel and Germany in these works.

#### **The Dance Works**

#### *a. Ami Yam Ami Yaar, the Bat Sheva dance company*<sup>3</sup>

*Choreography: John Cranko. Soundtrack: Uri Zvi Grinberg, Tuvia Robner, Chaim Nachman Bialik, Shlomo Tanay, Yizhak Lamdan, Y.Z Rimon, Elza Lasker Shiller, Natan Zach. Music: Ruth Ben Zvi (original score). D. Zeltzer, E. W. Sternberg. Reading: Hannah Maron. Costumes: Ya'akov Sharir, Yair Vardi. Lighting: Chaim Tchelet. First cast: Rachamim Ron, Ehud Ben David, Ya'akov Sharir, Yair Vardi, Yechiel David, Robert Pomper, Zvi Apt, Rina Sheinfeld, Nurit Stern, Yael Lavi, Dalia Levi, Esther Nadler, Lori Friedman, Pamela Sherni, Gabi Bar.*

<sup>3</sup> All these sources have been analyzed in their original Hebrew format; translation is author's own.

*Second cast: Rachamim Ron, Roger Briant, David Dvir, David Oz, Proaluf Perlond, Martin Kravitz, Zvi Gotnhiener, Lea Avraham, Lori Friedman, Pamela Sherni, Ruth Kleinfeld, Nurit Stern, Tamar Zafrir.*

In the fall of 1971 celebrated South African born choreographer, John Cranko, arrived in Israel to restage his work "Concerto of the tree of knowledge" and to create a new dance for the company: *Ami Yam Ami Ya'ar*. *Ami Yam Ami Ya'ar* was an epic dance, accompanied by readings of Hebrew poetry, which focused on the Holocaust and the founding of the Jewish state in the land of Israel (Gluck 2006: 116). The work emphasized bravery and courage, which were core themes of the Holocaust narrative in that period. The dance work is accompanied by poetry readings (delivered by Israeli actress Hannah Maron) which is delivered with referential movement: when Maron says "ocean", the movement resembles waves, and when Maron says "forest" men carry women as branches (Manor 1978). The piece deals with the relationship between individual and collective along two circles: the larger one, the destruction and regeneration of a nation, and the smaller one, focusing on the individual (portrayed by different dancers in different parts of the work) which changes from being a specific individual to becoming "everyman" (Gluck 2006: 117; Manor 1978).

The de- individuation of the dancers is an underlying theme throughout the work. They wear uniform simple black costumes, and gradually lose their identities, as if preparing themselves to the massacre, in which all names and faces will be erased. Cranko's work starts with a group of men who walk towards their death. It goes through various scenes of torment and ends with the "Hands of Israel" scene. The ballet is comprised of 13 scenes (in the first version; seven in the second) which all focus on the theme of suffering (Sodin 1975). The movement is dramatic and there are obvious references to lamentation and grief. The movement is repetitive but does not infer the repetitiveness of the everyday, but rather the ritual movement of grief and distress.

The spatial organization uses references to mythic imagery of the Holocaust; massacre, a group of corpses, etc. There is a choreographic connection between the ceremonial movement, grief and regeneration. The grief is not individual; it loses its specific characteristics and is in the background of the heroic deeds and re- constitution of the nation, inferred in the end of the work. The republican discourse can be seen in the movement language and the use of space. The grief at that point is still new; the individual cannot appropriate the grief for themselves; it is part of the nation and state building process, of a collective trying to build itself out of the ruins. Death and grief become the building blocks of that project and become unavailable to the individual. Connecting grief and heroism displaces the process of overcoming the death of a loved one from the private sphere towards the common good.

We see here the undoubtable prominence of the republican discourse of citizenship; the one, singular body is subdued to the common good, the ethos of togetherness; cohesiveness of the community is prioritized to the ontological and moral position of the individual; and the moving singular body understands itself by its relationality to group dynamics. Art is witnessing a founding moment, a turn from grief to nation-building, a shift from genocide to creating legal and political systems of recourse for the Jewish people, who, for the first time in history, start imagining themselves as a *people* or a *nation.* The body is inscribed with this nation-building process, documenting the moments of upheaval as well as the moments of rejuvenation; crisis and new beginnings, rupture and rapture. All those processes, though, are narrated through a collective discourse of citizenship, the group inscribing upon the body of the individual its communal ethos.

#### *b Memento Mori*

*The Kibbutz dance company. Premiere: 7.7.1994 Choreography: Rami Be'er. Soundtrack design: Alex Claude. Lighting: Nisan Gelbard. Costumes: Lilach Hazbani, Efrat Roded*  (Reich 1994)*.*

According to Rami Be'er: "Memento Mori isn't a work about the Holocaust….it's a work that uses associative, emotional and rational connections to our current lives and reality. The private and collective memory are always there in the background" (ibid.). This work deconstructs the modern individual and tries to examine how the Holocaust, among other collective Israeli experiences, moulded Rami Be'er's own conceptualization of citizenship.

Rami Be'er looks at the way we perceive the Holocaust, how current experiences shape our collective memory. Be'er refers to the Holocaust as a starting point to question the memory of the Holocaust in Israel and the tension between individual and collective memory (ibid.). The focus is on the individual, trying to mould themselves among societal and political forces. Be'er uses the work to reflect on his own experiences as the son of Holocaust survivors. He unravels the family experiences he's been through, his intimate relationships and private associations. This memory is always grounded in the collective memory, drawing on myths, popular narratives, the education system and generally, the public discourse.

The staging allows for the spectator's eye to be drawn to the depth of the stage; which in turn makes them feel alienated and lonely, dislocated in space. The spectators' eyes focus is on the group, moving together, between the front and back of the stage, and an individual, breaking away from the group, creating their own narrative, different from the unison movement (ibid.).

Thus the focus is in itself fragmented, creating a sensation of further alienation, separateness. The individual experience draws on the collective narrative but stays in the private sphere as a singular narrative. The emphasis is on the singular dancer, how she or he she is influenced by group interactions of which he or she are part; the contradiction between loneliness and the quest for belonging; processes of creation of the self in a community that seeks to strengthen the common good. The emphasis is clearly on the individual, trying to resist being moulded by the collective. The choreography moves between unison movement to individuals breaking out, creating their own narratives in movement. The self is always trapped between the will to belong to a community and trying to protect the unique, the individual, the private.

Be'er uses many movements drawn from everyday experiences such as running and walking. The stage is dark and the dancers are lit from above. The soundtrack is a musical collage. The work draws on fragmentation, isolation of its constitutive subjects. The references towards the everyday allow manoeuvring in a limited space of movement; construction of the stage in simple formations. There are large squares on the stage, referring perhaps to the trains used by the Nazis to take Jewish people towards their death. In a sharp contrast to that, the dancers move in round, spinning paths, resisting the aim to place them in these squares and limit their movement to them. These stylistic features show the aim to deconstruct, to question, to move into the constitutive registers of the individual. The movement and stage design draw on the everyday, on the casual, and move away from monumental events and mythic references. There is an attempt to demarcate the spaces in which the individual moulds his or her own narrative but that space- and its boundaries- are always contested. Be'er doesn't try to convey a coherent message; he strives to illuminate the core themes of the work from various angles. The work focuses on the price the individual pays for belonging to a group; the price the individual pays for separating from a group; and the constitutive tensions of the formation of a narrative about the self.

In the second half of the work, while three dancers move, looking downwards, there is narration of Kohelet. The individual is posed as helpless among greater forces that move – and shape – him or her (Rottenberg 2000: 13). In another part of the work, a female dancer moves when her back faces the audience, while in the background the audience can hear a whip (Reich 1994). The contradiction between the sacred and the cruel becomes enmeshed in a greater distinction, between the inner and the outer, the self and the other. Be'er starts and ends the performance with the sentence: "ma shehaya hu shyihiye". Although not always discussed as the central narrative of the work, the collective ethos is there in every image on stage.

The dominate discourse of citizenship here is undoubtedly the liberal discourse of citizenship. The individual struggles and rejoices, fails and succeeds, shifts and re-structures itself; as a result the group, the nation-state, becomes re-aligned. The epistemic, ontic and moral starting point is the individual moving body rather than the collective ethos; shifts in the latter are consequences of changes in the former. Further, this work present further implications in the shift between discourses of citizenship; it shows the price the individual pays for participating in group dynamics. Concepts such as alienation, loneliness and estrangement are interpreted as a result of participating in groups; the individual may pay a price for contributing to collective ethos and that price may be heavier than the cohesiveness generated by processes such as nation-building or ethos formation. Thus this is a critical appraisal of the price participating in republican discourse of citizenship bears on the individual moving body. Dance here witnesses the costs individual bodies pay for their political participation.

#### **A Comparative Discussion: Memory as Foundational; Memory as Ruptured**

The two above presented close readings may be used to show that these two works start at different, perhaps even opposite, presumptions. Whereas the earlier work looks at processes of cresting a common good, a civic virtue, the later work looks at its deconstruction, at the efforts the individual makes to resist social and political dynamics and their constant strife to mould the independent *I*. The interpretation of the Holocaust as a monumental event is with regard to the individual and not the collective. The speaking, moving and moved *I* becomes the centre of the choreography.

The underlying theme of alienation hints towards moving away from the Republican discourse of citizenship; not only does the human being find his or her narrative by subjecting themselves to the common good, they pay a heavy price for partaking in social dynamics. Trying to distance the individual from the narrative of suffering and bravery is a way to recover the private self and its underlying dynamics. The individual questions the price he or she pays for belonging to a group; for submitting the private grief and trauma to collective interpretation. Dance, as a primarily spatial art form is a highly efficient and potent method of witnessing this shift. The differences in organization of the stage and the choreographic use of the moving body, shifting it from a building block of communal structures to the focus of the spectator's gaze enables it to register those shifts in a powerful way.

Another characteristic which sets these two works apart is the place the Holocaust takes in Israeli public discourse and more specifically in the understanding of Israeli-German relationship and their place in it. At first sight, it seems that the themes underlying both works haven't changed since the 1970s to the 1990s; both works deal with the relationship between the individual and the group, alienation, dealing with death, grief and mourning, striving to build personal relationships such as love and friendship while dealing with trauma, and trying to create a normal personal life when history poses the individual within an abnormal historical context. At the same time, the differences between these two works highlight changes that have taken place in Israeli society over these two decades. The holocaust becomes re-interpreted, moving from the foci of the founding moment of Israel as a nation-state as one factor among many which contribute to identity formation among young Israelis. Let us discuss the specific philosophical- choreographic features which differentiate the two works, allowing Israeli dance to witness shifts in dynamicity and the construction of the speaking self, the moving body, as an inscribed and inscribing surface of events.

First, the distinction between the self and the other-than-self, the external space to the self fundamentally changes between the two works. Whereas in the first work the self is subsumed into the collective and the other is placed externally to the collective, in the second work there is otherness inside what has been as a coherent collective. Moreover, one can trace questions regarding the price paid by the individual for being part of a collective, for giving up some of the most private moments of his or her life, such as dealing with loss of a loved one. The relationship between the body as a space – inscribed and inscribing – and the space occupied by the body becomes re-negotiated. The ontic and moral position of the body within its web of meanings is interpreted anew, and thus the understating of the body itself becomes negotiated. Dance witnesses the shift in relationality between moving bodies.

Second, there is a difference in the choreographic elements used in both works. In the first work there is an emphasis on building, on creating coherent spatial forms, of merging individuals into entities which are larger than the sum of the individuals comprising them; in the second work there is an emphasis on deconstruction, on finding the individual within the spatial organization, on moving from the monumental towards the everyday, the building blocks which make history what it is. Not only does the relationship between bodies shift, and that witnessed in the dance; the actual processes by which bodies become inscribed are re-envisioned and re-interpreted. From processes of building *Ami Yam, Ami Ya'ar* witnesses, the process of disintegration, alienation and disengagement becomes witnesses through *Memento Mori*.

Third, the method of narration gains different foci in each work; whereas in the first work we see a collective narrator created out of individual voices the second work is a puzzle of individual voices telling their own narratives. The collective voice gains prominence over the individual embodied voice. Both works exhibit clear features of embodied storytelling though the composure of the narrator is very different. The voice which is inscribed as well as inscribes shifts from a collective voice to an individual witness, who in turn, also witnesses the effects of group formation has on individual moving bodies of which it is part. The storyteller is always a singular, moving I in the latter part of Israeli history as documented in Israeli dance.

Last, the use of space is fundamentally different between those two works. Whereas in the first work the stage becomes a space built from individual bodies, embodied narratives, the second work is a space continuously broken by new, entangled narratives that disrupt it and create diverse spaces. Every moment of dance creates a different space, to be interrupted and presented with a new spatial organization in its stead. Thus the emphasis is on disruption of space rather than building it; competing narratives that do not necessarily reside comfortably together within the same body but continuously challenge each other. The idea of a communal space shared by bodies is negotiated and critiqued. Consequently, the actual ability of communities to provide space for moving bodies in which they share rather than contest over it becomes critiqued. It seems every body occupies a space of its own, and one body's selfinterpretation can bear a heavy price on other's use of space. Let us move from this choreographic analysis of the two works to conclude about the significance of citizenship discourses and their shift to embodied memory.

### **The Body Says what Words Cannot: the Agonism of Citizenship Discourses**

We have seen that through dance the body can and does witness. We have seen that Israeli dance records the move from what Rogers Smith, and Shafir and Peled, term republican discourse of citizenship to a liberal discourse of citizenship. The dancing body records the shift from the emphasis on the collective to a more liberal, individual focused prism. But the dancing body remembers more than that. The dancing body remembers the undoing of identity; the conflict between languages, discourses, ideas; the histories that are always shifting, always transcending the moment of their telling. The dancing body remembers the struggle of power over the force to inscribe upon it; but the dancing body registers the struggle itself, the quest for power. It allows for more than one language to write on the body. The body remembers joy and pain; triumph and loss; grief and exhilaration. The body remembers sacred and holy; one and many; love and war. The body remembers fire and ice; scars and ecstasy.

The use of the analytic prism of citizenship discourses allows for careful examination of the fundamental multiplicity of political identity. This multiplicity means that at any given point we cannot trace one way of understanding the way human beings relate to their polity. This multiplicity does not only occur across different time spans; at any given moment the body can remember contradicting discourses; differing opinions; varying influences. The shift towards understanding citizenship as a multifarious concept – here across time – allows for this multiplicity to exhibit itself in a singular moment. Political identity is never homogenous. The body is never homogenous. The dancing body remembers, above all, the many temporalities, many spatiality modes inscribed upon it. The chapter started by revisiting Foucault's statement that the body is the inscribed surface of events. It always records many events, sometimes conflicting, sometimes torn apart. Dance serves as a method of witnessing not only the complex nature of choreography itself, which operates, as the analyses here have shown, on many levels and in many ways; but the complex nature of political identity itself. Through the conceptual prism of agonism, as allowing for contesting voices to occupy one space, this account shows the multiplicity of discourses inscribing on the moving body at every given moment. Dynamics between discourses are outcomes of power relations; multiple voices write upon moving bodies, which in turn document not only the voices but the dynamics between them. The organization of communal space depends on how shifting bodies document shifting politics and shifting narratives. Dance as an art form which is both in constant flux and always embodied witnesses the shift in narrators, stories and voices; but it also witnesses the shift of organization of shared space. This chapter argues that an interpretation of always competing voices allows for inclusion of more speaking Is as well as the interpretation of price politics bears upon the individual. Hence this chapter has shown dance can not only witness shifts in discourses of citizenship but the price hegemonic discourses bear on the moving body. The moving body remembers the price it has to pay for joining in with collective enterprises.

In her now canonical account of pain and torture, *The Body in Pain*, Elaine Scarry discusses the making – and unmaking – of a world through the body. She argues that pain is unsharable; it is derived from an epistemic contradiction (Scarry 1985: 4). "To have pain is to have *certainty;* to hear about pain is to have *doubt*" (ibid.: 13). Thus, experiencing pain creates a void in language; it is essentially inexpressible. But what we have seen in the discussion of the two above works, and their relationship to the discourses of citizenship, is quite a different epistemic position. It is the pain – either the pain of the victims as articulated by Cranko, or the pain of the memory as shaping relationships in the public sphere as articulated by Be'er – that creates the essence of dance as a language. Horror, destruction of many worlds, that has shaped the founding moment of the state of Israel, creates the unique embodied language of both those dance works. But that language in itself is fluid; different discourses of citizenship take different foci at different times. What we have seen, in both works, though while accentuating different emphases, the body allows to witness pain, suffering and grief; it inscribes it on the bodies of the spectators; allows it to be shared, if also not through verbal language. The body remembers, and speaks; it sometimes shrieks with pain. It allows for the narration of the unccomunicable in words; for voices which usually do not get heard to claim their space in the public sphere. Dance as witness allows the body to generate alternative discourses which are shared; they inscribe upon other bodies moments of pain and trauma that sometimes are defied by words. Dance can transcend language. In the words of dance pioneer Martha Graham: the body says what words cannot.