Bearing Witness to Slow Violence's Atmospheres

Collaborative works by artists, photojournalists, academics, activists, and drug war survivors have been at the forefront of the resistance against the brutal 'war on drugs' of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, a policy that has killed thousands since 2016. Through photographs, theatre, participatory performance, music, and film, these multi-sensorial and participatory works unmask and resist the drug war as a "regime-made disaster" (Azoulay 2012). This is a disaster that is built on and reproduces a body politic that differentiates between those who are considered by the Duterte regime as citizens on the one hand, and "flawed citizens" on the other hand, where the latter are dehumanized and eradicated. In reimagining citizenship and thus reconceptualizing the political community, these collaborative works are furthermore enactments of a "politics of world-building" where "an ethics of dwelling" and "becoming otherwise," rather than being trapped in the violence of the everyday, are made possible (Zigon 2014). As such, beyond the quest for justice, these collaborations are also processes of healing, caring, and creative building of an alternative world.

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(Trigger warning). The Performance Collective Owdnegrin explores the possibilities of artistic research, art and anthropology to address the effects of slow violence using the example of sexualized violence during childhood. The public discourse around that topic often addresses the traumatic experiences itself, while the long-term consequences remain hidden from society´s consciousness. Missing practices to communicate and interact with affected persons and the overwhelming brutality of the topic itself often lead to re-traumatizing situations that perpetuate the experienced violence on a social level. Victim and single perpetrator narratives do not reveal the structural and institutional conditions in which personal experiences are embedded and which continually affect people. Art is a tool to disseminate knowledge and to create spaces in which meaningful encounters can take place and influence the discourse. The performance addresses the traces of trauma, resilience and everything in between that are so deeply inscribed into the body that words remain silent.

The visualization of natural disasters is one of the most significant parameters by which the perception of hazards and risk are socially constructed. During the last two decades, mostly due to media coverage, awareness of natural disasters has been growing worldwide. Photographs of natural disasters undergo global distribution as iconographic motifs and the increasing circulation of images transforms the processes of interpretation and elaboration both during and after a catastrophe. Nationally and internationally, images are becoming a set of repertoires to glean from – topoi that form a collective imaginary of catastrophes - but the long-term effects that these events generate at the community level are largely underrepresented. They pose acute representational challenges and require creative ways of drawing public attention (Nixon 2011). Building on a corpus of images about the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, its aftermath and the reconstruction process, this contribution discusses how these images gained political functions in the process of re-elaboration of the disaster and its consequences both at the community and national levels.

This presentation seeks to experiment with audiovisual archives as a durational medium to understand slow violence in West Papua, a self-identifying term referring to Indonesia’s troubled provinces of Papua and West Papua. Fighting for its independence since 1965, West Papua has become the site of Indonesia’s most prolonged military operation. Moreover, West Papua’s rich natural resources have paved the way for the extractive industry to intensify violence against the indigenous population and their land through the militarization and industrialization of West Papua’s landscape. West Papua’s exposure to violence has been understood through different lenses: ethnonationalist conflict, genocide, ecocide, occupation, and colonialism. These different terms refer to violence that has become a structure, rather than events, of everyday lives. Using various archives from West Papua’s digital and analog sphere, this experiment will attempt to understand the temporality that it takes to endure this violence and how the Papuans deal with the durational length of slow violence.