Regarding War: Image/Text

We are delighted to announce that our bid for IAS Incubation Programme funding for ‘Regarding War’ has been successful: the Academic Board responsible for selection felt that the proposal "was very strong" and awarded funding up to the full amount requested, £2500, which is being used to commission a photographer and a creative writer, and to establish a dedicated section of the transculturalwriting site:  the two participants will keep a diary of the creative process on weblogs and will consider aesthetic, political and ethical implications of the image-making process. The resulting art work and reflection will inaugurate the online archive.

Project summary

‘Regarding War: Image/Text is to be developed under the aegis of the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research in collaboration with LICA. It will produce an archive of creative imagery and writing that reflects upon the experience of contemporary war(s) from perspectives in the North-West of England. The project will be free-standing in terms of its funding, methodology, and locus of production and dissemination, but will also make a lasting contribution to the Faculty ARP ‘Touching War’. Its overarching aim is consonant with the ARP’s interest in ways in which contemporary war(s) ‘touch’ individuals and communities.

Key Facts

Funder:  IAS Incubation Project Funder

Type of Activity: Collaborative Research, IAS Incubation

Co-investigators: Lindsey Moore (English and Creative Writing), Graham Mort (English and Creative Writing), Emma Rose

Consultants: Lee Horsley (English and Creative Writing), Kate Horsley (English and Creative Writing)

Dept/Research Groups: Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts and the Department of English and Creative Writing

Details of proposal

‘Vision is always partial and provisional, culturally produced and performed, and it depends on spaces of constructed visibility that – even as they claim to render the opacities of “other spaces” transparent – are always also spaces of constructed invisibility’
(Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present, 2004)

‘A photograph is an invitation to speculation’
(Susan Sontag, On Photography, 2001)

 

‘Regarding War: Image/Text is to be developed under the aegis of the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research in collaboration with LICA. It will produce an archive of creative imagery and writing that reflects upon the experience of contemporary war(s) from perspectives in the North-West of England. The project will be free-standing in terms of its funding, methodology, and locus of production and dissemination, but will also make a lasting contribution to the Faculty ARP ‘Touching War’. Its overarching aim is consonant with the ARP’s interest in ways in which contemporary war(s) ‘touch’ individuals and communities.

Our focus will be upon the potential of imagery and writing to re-present war in the North-West as imagined and contested regional space mediated by international conflict; our geographical context can hence be defined as global/local. Gregory (above) draws attention to ways in which ‘other’ spaces – exemplified by the absent-present battle zones of contemporary Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine – are continuously constructed as (in)visible in particular ways. The challenge, then, is to imagine forms of testimony, memory, touch, affect, and identification that challenge the parameters of visibility, commensurate constructions of proximity and distance and, by extension, definitions of identity and difference. It is our belief that a combination of visual imagery and creative writing will provide a productive interface for reframing such questions. The imagery and writing produced through the programme will necessarily involve a consideration of ways in which imagery of war is already highly mediated, disabling potential for tactile and affective response. It is hoped that it will also evoke/solicit alternative structures of response to war(s) across geographical and other (eg experiential, cultural, religious, gendered) axes of difference, distance, and affiliation.

*Photographs are often uncritically received as transparent representations of ‘truth’. However, a photograph is a message, often mediated by text (eg. its caption) and implicitly informed by ideological context. Framing, montage, composition, choice of subject matter and (self-)censorship suggest analogies between photography and acts of narration. The temporal structures of a photography and a piece of writing tend, however, to be construed in opposite fashion, with still imagery (particularly photo-journalism) understood as ‘immediate’ and writing as ‘reflective’. The programme will view imagery in relation to processes of reading and rewriting, with the aim of advancing theorisation of visual/textual modes of engagement that is as yet critically underdeveloped.

*The programme will engage debates about the different cultural/ethical work that ‘testimony’ and ‘art’ are often assumed to perform. A self-reflexive combination of visual and textual economies of production and reception will help to complicate notions of witnessing, on the one hand, and simulation and/or aestheticisation, on the other. The work produced will be encouraged critically to address the possibilities and risks of, for example, desensitisation, voyeurism, objectification, empathy, and mourning.

*As Roland Barthes argued, a photograph can contain a punctum that ‘pierces’ the viewer because something more is communicated to the viewer than can be explained by the objective and symbolic content of the image. The programme will engage the kinds of (dis)identification that are opened up or foreclosed by photographs, and consider whether creative writing offers different or supplementary economies of (dis)identification.

*Geographies (real and imagined) of physical, emotional, intellectual and political proximity and distance (affected by diverse axes of individual and community identification) affect responses to war. Taking the North-west of England as context of production and reception will enable critical reflection upon the ongoing production of ‘imagined communities’ in the UK and of community interfaces and disjunctions inflected by migration and diaspora.

 

Central to the conception of ‘Regarding War’ is a staged process of creative production and reflection that involves an increasing number of artists and writers, then non-professional participants, and finally produces a democratic space in which a range of ‘imaginings’ (visual and textual) are juxtaposed. The current bid to the IAS Incubation Fund is for the pilot stage of the programme, which will produce an exemplar of the image/text interface and initiate the online archive. The three phases of the programme are as follows:

Phase One: Pilot (funded by IAS)
An online gallery space will be established on the Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research website.
An exemplar of a photographic/creative writing interface will be commissioned that reflects upon ways in which war touches and/or can be touched from North-West perspectives. The photographer and creative writer will collaborate on a set of 5 hybrid images accompanied (in ways that will be left open) by text. Images may be made through high-resolution digital or film-based photography, hand-held devices such as mobile phones, web cams, photograms or other photographic techniques. They may be ‘captured’ or manufactured and may combine environmental experience, found objects, media outputs, textual artefacts and digital manipulation. Writing accompanying the images can be in any form (eg. a poem, diary entry, song) within a word limit considered suitable for mounting on the website in conjunction with the image. The overall product may focus on ‘external’ manifestations of conflict and/or reflect ways in which war touches dwelling places and interior spaces supposedly removed from the ‘action’. Writer and artist will be encouraged to consider ways in which war touches individuals and communities across local, national and transnational space.
The two participants will be required to keep a diary of the creative process on weblogs and to consider aesthetic, political and ethical implications of the image-making process. The resulting art work and reflection will inaugurate the online archive.

Phase Two: Expansion (funded by Arts Council North-West)
A bid will be made to Arts Council North-West in early Jan. 08 for a Grant for the Arts to fund five further hybrid image/text commissions reflecting on the same theme and research-as-practice questions.

Phase Three: Wider Participation (funded by Arts Council or AHRC/British Academy)
Sep. 2008. The website will be opened to public contributions of imagery and creative writing.

Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research, County College, Lancaster University, LA1 4YD, UK