Abstract Oral testimony is used as a tool for gaining insight about traumatic events from the perspective of survivors. But research also acknowledges that narrative accounts do not necessarily move us closer to that trauma. This article asks what might be learnt from performance with Lucho Ramírez, an actor from Peru who lost his home as a boy in an earthquake. Working with Lucho as what I call a “privileged spectator,” I reflect on his recent reproduction of Wandering and Sleeplessness , a play first staged in 1981, to show how it expands on the hesitations that punctuate testimonials of the disaster. In the vein of affect theater, the play conjures memories and nightmares relating to the event as theatrical images. These images, in turn, create affects that transport the spectator to an ephemeral Andean underworld that is inhabited by more‐than‐human beings. This world—called Ukhu Pacha—might also be understood as a “space of death”; it is an otherworldly realm that nurtures transformation. Thus, I consider how actor and spectator are changed by Wandering and Sleeplessness , and what this reveals about the afterlives of disaster.
Abstract How can we stay with the trouble of witnessing and documenting genocides past and present through film? This Dissonance (2024) by Christophe Katrib grapples with the unique predicament of being a diasporic Lebanese filmmaker training his attention to the American‐backed genocide in Palestine and South Lebanon. Averting the gratuitous, voyeuristic desire to reproduce this violence on screen, Katrib's film assembles a fragmentary, poetic response that pairs beautiful visuals of the American West with audio recordings of poetry recitations and archival social media material. While this equivalence of place alludes to a formidable connection between different, interrelated genocides, the film also concedes the impossibility of depicting these connections explicitly. Overall, This Dissonance advances a mode of deferred representation that rejects an anthropocentric economy of violent images when it comes to genocide, drawing our attention to how filmmakers and visual anthropologists can document graphic violence without fully representing it.
Abstract This article examines how digital visual activism constructs alternative narratives of the 1965–1966 mass violence in Indonesia through the poster work of Alit Ambara. Focusing on selected series from the Posteraksi platform, the study analyzes how visual strategies such as irony, symbolic inversion, and affective disruption challenge state‐sponsored historiography and cultures of silence. Drawing on theories of counter‐memory, counter‐archives, and image‐events, the article argues that Ambara's posters operate as memory‐making interventions that reopen the past to ethical debate. Central to this practice is a form of icono‐ethics, which repurposes state icons to restore the dignity of victims and demand accountability. Situated within Indonesia's stalled transitional justice processes, these posters emerge as crucial cultural responses to legal impunity and archival denial. Methodologically, the study combines semiotic analysis with digital ethnography to trace the circulation of images across affective publics: online communities unified by shared emotional engagement and resistance to amnesia. The article demonstrates that where formal justice mechanisms have failed, digital visual practices function as provisional yet powerful counter‐archives, sustaining remembrance through circulation, affect, and collective ethical commitment.
Abstract In this short essay I want to question how some of the sensory thinking, particularly about sound, emerging within digital and visual anthropology can support our understanding of digital objects and images in museum collections. If digital media is the future of much contemporary everyday cultural production, what are the consequences for the future of ethnographic collecting? Are the lessons being learned within the ethnographic collection, including debates about colonial histories and modes of collecting, repatriation, and sovereignty over collections, helpful for shaping the modalities of digital collections and vice versa?
