5.17. What Does It Mean to Witness? Memory, Ethics, and Representation

The following paper explores the significant role of art and media in shaping, transforming, and challenging collective memory. It examines how film acts as a platform for processing and publicly debating issues related to historical trauma, denial, and ethical remembrance. Focusing on Ravished Armenia (1919), produced by Near East Relief, and Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002), the study analyzes how cinema mediates the relationship between history, trauma, and collective identity in the context of the Armenian Genocide. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of time and Laura Marks’s concept of the “haptic image,” the analysis investigates how visual and affective aesthetics convey themes of displacement, suffering, and resilience beyond verbal testimony. The paper situates these films within broader discussions on representation and historical accuracy, drawing comparisons with Holocaust cinema to demonstrate how artistic media can influence public understanding of atrocity, inform ethical awareness, and contribute to political discourse. Incorporating the theoretical insights of Dominick LaCapra, Maurice Blanchot, Adriana Cavarero, and Paul Ricœur, the paper emphasizes that responsible cinematic storytelling can counter denial, affirm survivor experiences, and promote moral reflection. These thinkers highlight the ethical responsibility of aesthetic representation to bear witness and foster dialogue, positioning art as a vital space for engaging with historical violence in both moral and political contexts. Ultimately, the paper argues that cinematic storytelling functions as both a form of resistance to denial and a means of reactivating collective memory across generations. Through its visual and emotional impact, film serves not only as a historical record but also as an active participant in the ongoing process of transforming collective memory—providing essential platforms for discussion, recognition, and ethical engagement with the past.

The paper is a reflection on a project for an educational portal allowing 'conversations' with survivors of the communist forced-labour camp Belene. It included video interviews with several elderly people conducted in the summer of 2022 and 2023, which are accessible at https://belene.camp. I will reflect on the demands for the interviewers and interviewees, and on the constraints imposed by the format and how they may have impacted the process of interviewing and the interviewees' performance. A second focus will be on ethics: what are the dimensions of victimhood; who has the right to testify and how do we use witnesses' accounts; what is the responsibility of the researchers and educators who shape the memory of controversial events and personalities.

On 27 September 1969, anti-apartheid activist Imam Abdullah Haron died in police detention in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1970 an inquest into the cause of death declared that it was likely an accident the result of a fall down a flight of stairs. Haron has been commemorated through multiple memorialisation initiatives including the recognition of his mosque and gravesite as provincial heritage sites. In 2023, a reopened inquest into the death found that Haron was tortured to death by the apartheid security police. The artist and memory activist Haroon Gun-Salie has created several artworks in Haron’s memory. In one such intervention, Gun-Salie worked with the archival documents of the original inquest and reimagined the post mortem report anatomy diagrams which visually documented Haron’s injuries, to create life size, three dimensional silhouettes. Amongst the more overt official memorialisation of Haron, this paper seeks to think with this more intimate artistic intervention, and its probing of the relationship between memory, justice and democratic accountability in post apartheid South Africa. Created to intervene in the reopened inquest, and to challenge the official narratives and silences, the artist described his silhouettes as more than art as evidence. Inside the court, the silhouettes became evidence - the forensic pathologist making use of them to explain Haron’s injuries. More than evidence, the artwork in some ways came to stand in for Haron himself. Through their materiality and size, the silhouettes have a powerful presence, or perhaps mark the presence of the Imam’s absence. What does this reimagined life size and upright format do to how the evidence is read and experienced as opposed to a one dimensional diagram in a post mortem report, and how does it enable a new interpretation of of the evidence and a counter-memory of the Imam's death?