Material Witness

Abstract

The evidential role of matter—when media records trace evidence of violence—explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milošević; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or “disaster film” produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.

Returning the Gaze of Surveillance: The Murder of Shireen Abu Aqleh

“…As part of the struggle against epistemic and political violence, the inversion of the gaze of surveillance and the assertion over visuality challenged the authority of official accounts (Bock 2016) and iterated Palestinians' right to exist (Mirzoeff 2011). By creating tension with dominant accounts projected by Israeli imaginaries and obfuscations echoed by Western media, every crafting and formulation of counter-data redistributes the narrative field and contributes toward the rehabilitation of technology's potential as a tool for political resistance beyond Palestine (Risam 2018;Schuppli 2020). In this way, the processes of disruption and subversion are also accompanied by a practice of creation.…”

Figure 1 from: Janus A, Sendyka R (2021) Depth of the field. Bystanders’ art, forensic art practice and non-sites of memory. International Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1: 73-83. https://doi.org/10.3897/hmc.1.63264

“…From a forensic, investigative or criminologist perspective, the environment can cooperate with the detective: the landscape is a source of evidence, crucial to the building of a case (Schuppli 2020). This perspective eludes traditional ways of approaching the landscape: the passive experience of landscape as a mere view and the active experience of a scene of action.…”

“…While the former camp is now in the process of being transformed into a monument and a museum, it has partly functioned as -and its margins still are -a non-site of memory. In her concept for the artwork, Grzywnowicz examines soil from non-sites of memory as a material witness of past violence (Schuppli 2020).…”

Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project

“…Whilst recent work on media witnessing emphasises the production and sharing of content, the accounts below examine the co-production of witnessing through data which both organises and is organised by remote, distributed actors. This article draws on both media and scientific witnessing (Leach, 2009), as well as recent work using perspectives from science studies to examine the enrolment of objects as 'material witnesses' to injustice (Forensic Architecture, 2014;Schuppli, 2014;Weizman, 2017). The study of data practices may suggest other ways of doing witnessing than those focusing on the singularity and immediacy of experience, instead focusing on socio-technical construction of intelligibility (Gray, 2018), response-ability (Haraway, 2016) and relationality (Star & Ruhleder, 1996) with data.…”