What We Shared: Towards the Politics of Empowerment

How do artists respond to events that shatter pre-existing ways of apprehending the world? Looking at What We Shared, a hybrid artist film set in a de facto state of Abkhazia, this paper argues that in this day and age it is precisely the embrace of feelings and emotions – the affective truth, that creates necessary conditions for participants and filmmakers to effectively process and offer valuable insights into the ‘unrepresentable’ events that contain multiple truths (war, ethnic conflict).

Informed by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s concept of potential history, Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie, as well as Jacques Rancière’s proposition that ‘the real’ is ‘an effect that is being produced, as opposed to a fact that needs to be understood’, this paper argues that engaging with archive, memory and trauma today requires experiential responses to testimony and that these responses challenge the rigidly defined categories of ‘objectivity’, ‘fact’ and ‘fiction.’ Kuc’s employment of Artificial Intelligence technologies to treat archival sources, as well as her method of ‘performative and experiential archiving’ will be explored in relation to more participatory ways of creating empowering systems of imagery that aim to address the potential exclusion and isolation that de facto states like Abkhazia entail.

As part of panel discussion ‘Dust: temporality and haunting in the cinematic mediation of the past’, with Vesna Lukic and Jill Daniels, Visible Evidence: Images of History conference, 11 August 2022.

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