We invite you to take part in a workshop with scholar and award-winning filmmaker Daniele Rugo, on images of political violence. The workshop follows on the screening of Rugo’s most recent documentary film, The Soil and The Sea (taking place on January 29, sign up here), which explores the link between Lebanon’s missing people and the 100 mass graves scattered around the country since the civil war.

The workshop centers on the question: how can we use visual culture [images, film, audio] to understand political violence, particularly within cityscapes?

Art historian Georges Didi-Huberman writes that we always ask both too little and too much of images (32-33). We want the whole truth and so complain because they neither hold nor communicate this truth (they are too partial, limited, too much is left outside of the frame). We also complain however about their status and – judging them according to a representational command – consign them to the status of copy, therefore invalidating whatever insight they might provide as sheer seduction. Didi-Hubermann also insists that we might fail images even when we take them seriously as documents, as ‘we sever them from their phenomenology, from their specificity, and from their very substance’ (33).

This workshop addresses a certain bias towards images, in particular when they express political violence. The focus is on images of violence, in spite of all that has already been said about violent images and in spite of the daily waves of images one is subjected to. In spite of this saturation (or perhaps because of it), it seems that a space is still open for an argument alongside these images, in their wake as it were.

Daniele Rugo – Professor of Film and director of The Soil and the Sea - will discuss concepts and approaches to find new ways of looking at images, and to reflect on our own research materials. You will be asked to bring a piece of visual material from your own research to work with. The objective is for us all to leave the workshop with a new set of tools we can use to look at our data.

We will work with writings by Georges Didi-Huberman, Ariella Azoulay, and Achille Mbembe.

Practical & registration

We invite doctoral and post-doctoral students working on violent conflict in the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America to participate in this workshop.

A (vegetarian) lunch will be provided.

To take part in the workshop, please email Eleri Connick and Esther Schoorel [e.connick@uva.nl, e.schoorel@uva.nl] by January 15 2024 with a short biography, your research area and the visual culture you would be bringing.