EXCESSES OF VIOLENCE // 2024
(Post-)documentary interventions and the visual negotiation of violence
TEACHING
SYNOPSIS
What does a documentary image of violence do to the people who see it? The seminar treats the documentary not as a genre or a label but as a critical method — a way of engaging with the world's realities — and pursues it through arts-based research, in which the artistic work is itself the research.
Each session begins from a text. The reading leads to a documentary work — a film, a photograph, a social media post. The seminar questions this work as a document and asks after the contexts it comes from. Reading and viewing raise the questions that the practical work then takes on.
The first half of the term works out this documentary attitude and follows its media practices from early modes of observing and showing through to the post-documentary and its question of affect. The second half turns to excesses of violence and asks which relations of looking and of power take effect in the works screened, and what spaces of experience open up around them.
Over the semester break, each participant chooses one of the works screened and develops a collage in response to it across three months — not to illustrate it, but to carry the inquiry further by other means. They research image fragments and gather them into an archive of their own, working with fragments only, never with a whole image as they found it, and noting the source of each. The collage comes to document what was and, at the same time, what could be.
Each participant then presents their collage. The conversation asks what the collage does to those present, and a recording keeps it. A written reflection accompanies the work. There is no summary at the end — the collages are left to stay unlike one another.