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[49] 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[50] 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[51] 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