Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211061178
E. Çaylı
Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars in the social sciences and the humanities have come to approach political violence as an environmental phenomenon, and conceptualize environmental injustices as violence (e.g. Barca, 2014; Buell, 2017; Gray and Sheikh, 2018; Lee, 2016; Nixon, 2011; Sharpe, 2016). Concurrently, material (including visual) cultural practitioners and theorists grappling with violence have mobilized the testimony of environments (e.g. flora, fauna, landforms, atmospheres, buildings, landscapes and cityscapes) to enhance the sensorial and epistemic valence of their work. This themed issue takes its cue from such mobilizations but also proposes to reconsider them in light of a series of fundamental questions that remain underexplored in this context of violence’s ‘environmentality’ (Agrawal, 2005) even as they have become increasingly complexified by it. These are fundamental questions because they concern the political claims and promises attached to testimony and its various registers such as documentational, figurative, forensic and artistic. We therefore ask: What are the political possibilities and limitations of enlisting environments as authoritative witnesses to violence? What might the sensorial multiplicity associated with testifying to violence environmentally entail for both the primacy of the visual and its critique as a Eurocentrism? How do the truths produced through such testimony bear upon the various politically pragmatic ends it is expected to serve, such as verification, adjudication, resubjectivation, reparation and reconciliation? Contributors to this issue, who work across visual cultures, media studies, architecture and human geography, and who were first brought together in an interdisciplinary symposium held in early 2019 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, explore these questions via a diverse range of contexts including Pakistan, Georgia, Colombia, Austria, Sri Lanka and Lebanon.
在过去十年中，越来越多的社会科学和人文科学学者开始将政治暴力视为一种环境现象，并将环境不公正概念化为暴力(例如Barca, 2014;过活,2017;Gray and Sheikh, 2018;李,2016;尼克松,2011;夏普,2016)。与此同时，与暴力作斗争的材料(包括视觉)文化从业者和理论家动员了环境(如植物、动物、地形、大气、建筑、景观和城市景观)的证词，以增强他们工作的感官和认知价值。这个主题问题从这种动员中得到了启示，但也建议根据一系列基本问题重新考虑它们，这些问题在暴力的“环境”背景下仍未得到充分探讨(Agrawal, 2005)，即使它们变得越来越复杂。这些都是基本问题，因为它们涉及证词及其各种记录，如文献、比喻、法医和艺术所附带的政治要求和承诺。因此，我们要问:让环境成为暴力的权威证人在政治上的可能性和局限性是什么?对于视觉的首要地位和作为欧洲中心主义的批判，与环境暴力证明相关的感官多样性可能会带来什么?通过这种证词产生的真相如何与期望它所服务的各种政治实际目的有关，例如核查、裁决、再主体化、赔偿和和解?该问题的撰稿人横跨视觉文化、媒体研究、建筑和人文地理领域，并于2019年初在伦敦政治经济学院举行的跨学科研讨会上首次聚集在一起，通过巴基斯坦、格鲁吉亚、哥伦比亚、奥地利、斯里兰卡和黎巴嫩等不同背景探讨了这些问题。
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211065055
M. de Silva
The centrality of apparition and disapparition as political manifestation and existential threshold informs enforced disappearance as a political regime that interrupts the existing densities and securities of social visibility in private and public spheres. The author contends that executive power deploys enforced disappearance to amplify its ekphrastic power. However, the latter can be confronted by the ekphrastic testimony of survivors of disappearance as surrogates of those kin who lack embodied presence. Ekphrasis is the creation of an effect upon its auditors that they are actually beholding through sound and/or language what is visually and temporally withdrawn from their present. Enforced disappearance names the extrajudicial ‘abduction and deprivation of liberty’ of individuals and communities by a sovereign that conceals the act, location of the victims, circumstances of their death and their post-mortem disposition. In this article, the author navigates the complex and intertwining agonistic social rhetorics of visibility and invisibility associated with it that collide as historicizing and dehistoricizing forces through competing ekphrastic rhetorics. She examines how ekphrastic witnessing as a form of blind witnessing becomes an affective media of postwar justice in a society that has erased and disavowed its war crimes.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211067434
A. Feldman
The forensics of environmental violence transposes habeas corpus from juridically individuated civil subjects to the forensic cartography of the conscripted, militarized and rapidly disappearing corpus of habitats. This forensics communicates with Peter Sloterdijk’s classification of terrorism (including state terror) in ‘Airquakes’ (2009) as environmental war, irrespective of disparate ideological justifications. A forensics of the power and privation that is entangled with juridical positivism and cognate humanitarian agendas presupposes the right-to-look as the property of a sovereign subject. However, the possession character of this right raises the question of envisioning a nonsovereign gaze and an ethics of opacity. The thinking through of a will not to will a right-to-look confronts the atmospheric and habitat hegemonies of technologies and ideologies of omnivoyance, including mass incarceration, policing, and the racial capitalism of environmental extraction.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211067952
Philipp Sattler, Dubravka Sekulić, M. Tomic
At Aflenz an der Sulm in south-eastern Austria, digging into the soil to see what material evidence of recent history it holds reflects a broader process of investigation. It uncovers the entanglements that produced landscape as a material and an immaterial construction. The article focuses on Aflenz unpacking its contemporary landscape that covers layers of (invisible) history – obliviated relations of politics, finance, and business – which formed it as a WWII labour and concentration camp. Considering also the subsequent processes of forgetting unearths the land and its soils as the constant and thus an unwilling archive and thereby the necessary object of inquiry. The article proposes investigation and ‘investigative memorialisation’ put forward by artist Milica Tomić, to consider such knowledge as a public matter, positioning it as an open-ended public form that can speak of the complexities afforded and deposited in the soil as memory.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211054388
D. Escudero
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211061181
A. Barry
This article develops two arguments. One follows from the idea that materials can be made into witnesses to environmental violence by drawing together the evidence generated from multiple sensors. In this way, the practice of Forensic Architecture entails a commitment to a distinctive form of collective empiricism that leads to the generation of ‘informed materials’. The second theme of the article follows from Forensic Architecture’s claim that the microphysical investigation of specific incidents can be a starting point in reconstructing larger political and environmental processes. In light of this claim, the author interrogates the relation between the evidence generated by material witnesses and the political situations to which this evidence contributes. His contention is that qualitative forms of social and historical research are required that both complement and go beyond the limits of Forensic Architecture’s commitment to collective empiricism.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211054386
Mollie Arbuthnot
The form and material of politics are at the heart of The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures. From the outset, the book is as concerned with the political fissures of the contemporary world as with the faded socialist states of the 20th century. In the words of Aga Skrodzka, it aims ‘to salvage the dismissed achievements and forgotten aspects of communist cultural work’ and ‘ask how these cultural formations inform our contemporary grappling with social, economic, and political challenges’ (pp. 1–2). In Skrodzka’s interpretation, paying attention to ‘the visual traces of imagined better futures’ (p. 3) is an urgent task that promises to lead to a wholesale rejuvenation of politics and form for the present day by ‘reimagining [communism] beyond the existing ways of thinking about it as a defunct project’ (p. 12) and envisioning an alternative, perhaps utopian, future.
{"title":"Review: Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu and Katarzyna Marciniak (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures","authors":"Mollie Arbuthnot","doi":"10.1177/14704129211054386","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129211054386","url":null,"abstract":"The form and material of politics are at the heart of The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures. From the outset, the book is as concerned with the political fissures of the contemporary world as with the faded socialist states of the 20th century. In the words of Aga Skrodzka, it aims ‘to salvage the dismissed achievements and forgotten aspects of communist cultural work’ and ‘ask how these cultural formations inform our contemporary grappling with social, economic, and political challenges’ (pp. 1–2). In Skrodzka’s interpretation, paying attention to ‘the visual traces of imagined better futures’ (p. 3) is an urgent task that promises to lead to a wholesale rejuvenation of politics and form for the present day by ‘reimagining [communism] beyond the existing ways of thinking about it as a defunct project’ (p. 12) and envisioning an alternative, perhaps utopian, future.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"610 - 613"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45634842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211066297
Helene Kazan
Through engaged analysis of entangled research-based practice, this article argues that thresholds of distinction between environmental or conflict-based violence are unbound across Lebanon’s critical lived–built environment. Drawing on the fields of architecture, law, art and cultural production, this investigative scope is engaged through de-colonial, feminist and critical legal theory and method. The analysis in this article is an attempt at dismantling the inherent asymmetric power structures – legal, political and architectural – operating through violent risk, which continue to evade certain frames of accountability. This is done to reveal the complexity of this violent limit condition and its materializations, in the proposal of a progressive methodological imagining and investigation: an unbound critical lived–built environment.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211054387
Katarzyna Falęcka
In 1974, women in a consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed an informal organization called the Ladies’ Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Its humorous name teased out a tension within textiles: they are key to traditionalist histories, while also frequently invested with a subversive potential. Evoking the traditionally feminized and supposedly harmless act of sewing alongside the menacing threat of a terrorist society, the women in the Ladies’ Sewing and Terrorist Society envisioned collective textile making as an insurrectionary process that might disrupt social conventions. Their logo, composed of an unassuming flower motif and typeface, was quickly reproduced on T-shirts, mugs, buttons and other merchandise. Almost half a century later, the logo remains popular among younger feminists, who have revived some of the iconography of secondwave feminisms in the US.
{"title":"Review: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics and Jessica Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power","authors":"Katarzyna Falęcka","doi":"10.1177/14704129211054387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129211054387","url":null,"abstract":"In 1974, women in a consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed an informal organization called the Ladies’ Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Its humorous name teased out a tension within textiles: they are key to traditionalist histories, while also frequently invested with a subversive potential. Evoking the traditionally feminized and supposedly harmless act of sewing alongside the menacing threat of a terrorist society, the women in the Ladies’ Sewing and Terrorist Society envisioned collective textile making as an insurrectionary process that might disrupt social conventions. Their logo, composed of an unassuming flower motif and typeface, was quickly reproduced on T-shirts, mugs, buttons and other merchandise. Almost half a century later, the logo remains popular among younger feminists, who have revived some of the iconography of secondwave feminisms in the US.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"605 - 609"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47217937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129211061182
N. Awan
Humanitarian agencies are relying more frequently on remote sensing, satellite imagery and social media to produce accounts of violence. Their analysis aims at creating more compelling narratives for the court of law or of public opinion and has contributed towards a forensic turn, thus complicating the already fraught relationship between the practice of witnessing and political subjects. This article explores how digital witnessing allows us to ‘see’ further and deeper into places that are at a distance from us, whilst at the same time creating the conditions that make certain subjects recede from view. I will discuss these issues in relation to a country I am familiar with and one that has been central to the forensic imagination – Pakistan – although the particular geographies within Pakistan that this imagination works with are not mine. Thinking with non-linear temporalities of violence, I explore how the forensic turn may have actually contributed to the erasure of the racialized political subject.
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