Without Visible Scars: Digital Art and the Memory of War

What is the role of the artist in re-creating a cultural landscape where the psychology and identity are shaped by multiple narratives of wars? the author’s art practice attempts to demonstrate the role of digital media in providing a platform for visual representation of multiple narratives. Article Frontispiece. Destruction N° 3, mixed media and human blood, digital print, 40 cm × 53 cm, 2003. (© lanfranco Aceti) the vision is that of a blood-covered sky within which the individual’s narrative is rooted. ©2009 isAst LEONARDO, Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 16–26, 2009 17 to recognize the existential structures of reality and eventually to reconcile with them. The reality and legacy of war and its destruction create a complex system of culture and memory. This system does not disappear with reconstruction. It remains ever-present in the archaeology of social structures, as individuals who are generations apart are still permeated with the original events, with multiple layers of invisible narratives. A continuous process of passing down memories of war and destruction shapes the interpretations of the witnesses and the descendants of those witnesses. This is a process of continuous reconstruction of destroyed visual coordinates, of multiple narratives and visual identities. The site of destruction becomes a place of neurosis, where reconciliation of some kind is not just necessary but paramount for the reestablishment of the coordinates of a vital social system. Hans J. Eysenck described the neurotic symptoms in these places and how they may represent the negotiation between diverse “learned patterns of behaviour, which for some reason or other are unadaptive” [4]. According to Eysenck, wars become a part of the cultural structures inherited by the “descendants” of these catastrophes. They breed behaviors and cultural strategies that reappear years or generations later. Had Eysenck been in Italy during the first Gulf War, he might have observed an example of the phenomenon of mass neurotic unadaptive behavior he describes. In that case, many people rushed out to buy food and other necessary products in order to face the supposed war emergency [5]. The Cultural Activity of the Artist as Intermediary The artist, as a creator and intermediary, can present alternatives to the official representation of war. This role is, therefore, fundamentally important in reformatting the memory of a locus of destruction, allowing a negotiation between different narratives. When the artist assumes the role of making both official and non-official versions visible, the new narrative short-circuits the officially established creed. Artistic negotiation merges the narratives of the military and those of the civilians. This new framework is an attempt to unite layers of contradictory meanings and events. Enriched by the complex cultural systems and web of relations of the parties involved, the multiple narratives and dialogues, in contrast to the monologues of winners and losers, offer an opportunity to reconstruct the past and act as a possible alternative to the mediated official narrative, redefining the modality of engagement and the significance of the events. Contemporary media, enforcing and endorsing diverse re-combinations of these narratives, play very diverse roles within the sociopolitical arena by mirroring the aspirations of the political class. They create a public interpretation of war that is in opposition to the individual narratives often expressed through oral history [6]. Overall, the scope of these narratives is to reconcile the individual with the war event. The imperative to meld public and private narratives stems from the individuals’ need to bridge the fracture caused by the traumatic experience of war, as well as the necessity to reestablish an individual and collective sense of identity and place. Children of refugees inherit their parents’ knowledge of the fragility of place, their suspicion of the notion of home. The site of our encounter, where the fracture between eras was briefly bridged, could not provide the soil where roots of belonging could ever again take hold [7]. It is my belief that art can—and sometimes has the duty to—represent a locus of belonging and identification in order to re-create a bridge and recompose a cultural fracture. The work has the onus of re-stating the horror of destruction Ar ti s ts A n d W Ar 18 Aceti, Without Visible Scars: Digital Art and the Memory of War Fig. 1. Without Visible Scars: The Memory Walk, mixed media and javascript, digital print, 40 cm × 25 cm, 2007. (© lanfranco Aceti) text by lanfranco Aceti and Dolores de Alma blanca. this is an itinerary of rediscovery of multiple narratives and interpretations of war events. and presenting the viewer with an emotive and rational engagement with the past, present and future through the interpretation of events and their ritualistic revival in a mythological and/or historical framework. It is with this engagement that the destruction and legacy of war, visible and invisible, can be temporarily settled and reconciled in the coexistence of multiple and conflicting narratives. It is the artwork’s display of referentials that allows the objectification and revival of the memory of the historical tragedy. Bringing both the pre-war locus and the war’s locus of destruction into the postwar landscape, the artwork becomes a post-war locus from which to reconstruct the future. It offers a synthesized notion of cultural inheritance. Digital representations of war, unlike any other space, become in the artistic process “the territory of the possible,” the locus of what if. The locus of this artistry is based on the necessity of replacing the inheritance of war—in its context of permanent death, physical destruction, psychological alteration and generational scarring. It is also a locus of emergence where, through dialogue, multiple possibilities are continuously realized in an engaging process of revival, reinterpretation and revalidation. Sensing the unfolding emergence requires organizational members to be sensitive to heteroglossia in their organizational lives. We run the risk of closing off the emergent properties of dialogue when we engage in communicative practices that rely on, and call forth, abstract formulations or systems of thoughts laden with unitary and totalizing concepts for understanding human existence [8]. Heteroglossia, a concept associated with Mikhail Mikhaïlovich Bakhtin’s work, is a series of multiple narratives and forms of communication. The concept is distinguished from the “general language” that is spoken with a single voice. My artistic approach favors a process of emergence, shattering the monologue of war speeches, which have no heteroglossia and, by nature, do not offer a choice between alternatives. The convergence of narrative processes through art and representation moves the conflict beyond the absolute affirmation of the war canons and the rejection of war ideologies. These are replaced with a personal dialogue of contrasting experiences and narratives. The heteroglossia of the narratives of both winners and losers, embodied in the representation of the war scars, can then move beyond the ideological monologues that, as totalizing concepts, offer no alternatives for cultural reconciliation. Between the two extreme forms of war monologues, those of winners and losers, all other forms of dialogues are either trapped, dismissed or excluded. Disengagement as a form of total rejection of war monologues through heteroglossia may offer more possibilities, particularly when captured through the representation of personal memories and narratives of the war events. In this process, visible monuments, invisible memories and narratives clash and intermingle. As a result, the negotiation of the real is not based on the establishment of rights and wrongs, but on the experience of a locus of war where, once the civic ethics have collapsed, everything becomes a personal tragedy. This approach re-presents a new conflict that, having been moved into the territory of the cultural, has to bring about new destruction in order to achieve a possible resolution. The clash is between the conflicting cultural narratives of the winners and the losers. The visible absence of a cultural negotiation between colonizer and colonized, winners and losers, reveals the inner destructive function of war that is erasure. Erasing a monument, erasing a cultural referent, is equivalent to erasing the identity not just of the place, but also of its inhabitants, who, almost like blank slates, are reformatted in accord with the cultural rules of the stronger military identity.