The aesthetics of crisis II

NAQD devotes an issue to the aesthetics of terror. Writing on ‘deadly fiction and the aesthetization of death’, historian and art theorist Soko Phay discusses the manipulation of truth by the perpetrators of genocide. Even without the services of a Leni Riefenstahl, Pol Pot’s acolytes used cinema to promote their vision of ultimate submission to the Khmer Rouge, seeking to efface all memory of what had been. There is next to no trace of the genocide in the surviving film: the slogan was ‘see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, understand nothing – obey without asking questions’.

A discussion follows, taking up the theme of ‘double obliteration’, both of people and material proof. Particularly for the next generation, it is crucial to find ways to rebuild memory, argues Phay. Fictional images ‘cannot replace evidence and objects that have been lost, but they give an insight into historic events which these young people did not experience’. A new cinematic culture is emerging, but ‘fiction can only come with considerable detachment, having made a degree of peace with the past’.

Art as sublimation: Sculptor Fethi Hadj Kacem discusses his work ‘The Labyrinth’, cast in the shape of a map of Algeria. He took inspiration as an adolescent in the 1990s from the rise of the Islamic movement, when ‘people seemed to have entered a never-ending spiral’. At its nadir in the 1990s, ‘people were told that Islam is the only path to salvation, but they did not want to take it, and ended up going back into the labyrinth’.

Source: The Eurozine Review, “On this side of the barbed wire”