Truth Tellers
Aims
The Truth Tellers project seeks to understand the ‘unspeakable’ aspects of descriptions, narratives and other representations, in both text and images. What is the meaning behind widely reproduced images of terrorists and victims? How do visual memorials and rituals function in political and social senses? What messages are communicated subliminally and subtly, beyond the headlines? Truth Tellers seeks to recover and explore representations of political and politicised trauma, delving into their wider meanings, functions and associations in a forensic manner.
Methods
To achieve these aims, The Truth Tellers project uses art practice (both visual and poetic) to retrieve and understand the aesthetic dimension of these utterances and representations. This is because the poetic and artistic practices we are engaging with can extract, isolate and probe more and deeper referents, as well as entire descriptive, categorising and normative mechanisms, which cannot be achieved through typical academic methods alone. These have aesthetic power but, because they do not act as direct referents, can rarely be named or addressed. We argue that just as there are categorising powers at work in describing anything, there is also a purely or nearly purely aesthetic dimension at work too. It has the same power but does not work on a direct sign-signified framework. Rather, it links a sign to a signification through purely aesthetic means such as colour, staging, aesthetic structure, sound, or even onomatopeyas. Art practice can identify, isolate and explore these aesthetic means, laying them out for further examination.
This is necessary because we are not only looking to understand what the ‘truth’ of a moment, description or image may be, but also why that ‘truth’ is told as it is. To achieve the retrieval of these aesthetic codes, our method takes deconstruction to a new practical application: we work with artists to literally dismantle and rebuild the images and descriptions we are exploring. In engaging with that process we have discovered more about the elements, logics and processes as well as conceptual structures that say what, who and why.
Trials Design
This exhibition and project are a pilot study for this approach. We analysed a single public event of traumatic magnitude and political significance: the Manchester Arena Attacks. We collaborated with poet Mariah Whelan and painter Tom de Freston to develop our methods and design new ones, particularly visual genealogy (for the visual art) and art archaeology (for the poems). The following short essays describe these approaches and detail some of their results, as well as other insights that emerged in this project.
Summary of Findings
In the visual section of the project, Christiana and Tom used a method of intervisuality, developed to both analyse visual representations of the aftermath of the Manchester bombing, and to provide a structure through which to explore these ideas in a practise-led, artistic sense. The academic analysis was therefore integrated with artistic practise in such a way that deconstruction of the key images was deepened and their key themes were probed further. In this process, images were broken down and remade, in order to understand how ‘truth’ was told, and to tell a different ‘truth’ that is archaeological, pathological, and probing in nature. We aimed not just to find out what the ‘truth’ of a moment or image may have been, but also why that ‘truth’ was told as it was; this required a forensic and practical approach to image-making.
Following collaborative discussions between Christiana and Tom, the combined intervisual study focused on the notions of innocence / purity, versus ‘evil’. Christiana’s analysis tended to focus on the constructions of innocence, purity and victimhood, which Tom then added to in his own parallel creative studies, with exploration of the construction of ‘evil’. This was not a decision so much as an organic development; Christiana delved into the construction of innocence by referring to related images of shrines, Catholicism, angels, and pop concerts, and Tom then probed the darker connotations of mask-wearing, chaos, and ambiguity in order to deconstruct this binary they had both observed. In this sense, the key images were deconstructed, found to be telling a narrative of good v evil through these visual tropes of innocence and purity. Then, through the practice-led component, those binaries were deconstructed. Tom’s work, in moving image, photography and painting, then sought to reveal the myriad, clashing identities at play in representations and responses to the bombings, as well as the ritualistic, mournful functions and emotional substance underlying them.
Ultimately, the combination of intervisual analysis, and its practise-led component, contributed a deeper understanding of these visual narratives in a political context. Revealing the underlying function—which was, in short, to bring about a sense of order following the ‘sublime’ event, or traumatic event, of the bombing itself—the analysis showed the ways in which ambiguous, chaotic and emotive ideas and observations were articulated into more palatable, comforting and simplified ideas in the press. These representations and stories served important and necessary functions; they brought the community together following trauma, and they minimised the political force of the attack itself, in showing a united front. However, as Tom’s images ultimately showed, the ‘truth’ of the moment and its aftermath was inevitably more complex and difficult to reconcile; the chaos and trauma of the attacks remained and underlied those media and communal attempts to give order and sense to a catastrophic event.
Please note that some images may be disturbing.
Impact
The contrast, interplay and contradictions between factual and artistic forms of expression yield significant insights as to the aesthetic construction of what appear to be known truths. Furthermore, in this pilot project we found that bringing art to bear on a political analysis can reveal more than insights concerning aesthetic subjectivity and signification. The art, its choices and focus, shone a light on how ‘unspeakable’ codes, feelings and relations marked the Manchester Arena attacks, what made the trauma powerful in public, and crucially the aesthetic means that codified the significance of those remembered truths. Vigils in Albert square were, as these poems and paintings remind us, also flowers, faces of little girls, words, pain, and song.
Work that has informed Truth Tellers includes:
Tom de Freston is an artist and writer based in Oxford. He has been the holder or various prestigious fellowships and residencies, including a Leverhulme Residency at Cambridge University, the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University and a Levy Plumb Residency at Christ’s College. His multimedia projects have received funding from the AHRC, TORCH, the Fell Fund and Arts Council England. His most recent publication was a graphic poetic retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice (Bloomsbury Academic 2015). For details on past solo shows and reviews visit: www.tomdefreston.co.uk
Mariah Whelan is a poet and academic based in The Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester where she is writing a new collection of poems and researching trauma, memory and form in contemporary Irish fiction. Her poems and critical writing have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Writing in Education, The Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology and Best New British and Irish Poets. The manuscript for her first collection won the AM Heath Prize and will be published by Eyewear in October 2019. A second collection of poems exploring archival material from The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the writer’s own unconscious participation in discourses of white supremacy will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2020.
Dr Pablo de Orellana is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and Co-Chair of the KCL Research Centre in International Relations. His research focuses on the role of identity in diplomacy, nationalism, International Relations theory, as well as Art History. He completed his PhD in International Relations at King’s College London in 2016, specialising in how diplomacy constructs knowledge about political subjects. He has published articles on the history and mechanics of nationalist ideas, diplomatic communication, the role of identity in diplomacy, and an upcoming monograph on the diplomacy of the First Vietnam War. His latest work, for which Truth Tellers is a pilot, seeks to develop research collaborations at the Art-IR nexus.
Dr Christiana Spens is an academic and writer, currently teaching in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, and writing for various art publications such as Art Quarterly, Elephant and Studio International. Her first monograph, The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain, is published by Palgrave Macmillan (2019), and develops a method to research visual genealogy. She has also published several other books, both fiction and non-fiction. She is currently working on a novel that deals with themes of trauma, identity and relationships.
Exhibitions
For the textual aspect of this project, Mariah and Pablo brought together two very different ways of looking at any given political text. Pablo collected local, national and international news articles concerning the attacks and shared them with Mariah. At this stage Pablo applied a form of classical Poststructuralist discourse analysis called archaeology: he analysed how identities were constructed, framed and set in relation to others, locating the points at which identities, people were or were not politicised, identifying the subjectivity of that politicisation as well as its historical, political and contextual conditions of possibility.
At the same time, Mariah explored Manchester as a site of meaning, emotion, meaning-making and as the living city that survived the attacks. This exploration was geographical -there are multiple references to Mancunian locales in the poems- as well as textual and historical. This allowed her to enter the mind of the night, of the events, of those not involved but who also participated in that instance of collective emotion and traumatic selse-making. Her poems are the fruit of these observations. In writing them, Mariah reflected the images, words, and ideas of emotion she encountered:
Because I cannot show you
what is at the centre of all this
I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edge
the way I walked through the back of the crowd
too afraid to go in. (Square, 2019)
The poems make choices that political analysis cannot. For example, ‘rip’ ignores the discursive and informational environment of the aftermath of the attacks entirely. In this deeply individual sense-making, the poet creates a space where the politicisation of the event is altogether missing, where we the audience can decide what the emotions mean to themselves. This is by definition an artificial space that could only exist in literature. In constructing such ideational spaces, the poet selects what goes into them. This is a key part of how Pablo and Mariah collaborated: the free-playing artist chooses which representations, images, emotions and ideas enter or do not enter the world she writes. This selection is entirely subjective, of course, and on its own carries no scientific value. Its analytical potential resides in the aesthetic relevance that drew the artist’s gaze to these specific elements.
The artist’s gaze and its analytical instrumentalisation lie at the heart of this approach. We might call it artistic archaeology, for Pablo then performed in-depth discursive analysis of the poems exactly as if they were one of the original pieces of political text. Again, as with the original empirical evidence, the objective was to understand how it creates identities, political positions, narrates events, represents the city, community and made sense of trauma.
Poetry revealed itself as a powerful method to identify, retrieve, and isolate single themes of aesthetic power and significance into a page-shaped petri dish. Pablo’s analysis of the poem ‘rip’, for example, found that, though the collectivity of such a traumatic aftermath might be assumed, the poetic exploration forces the reader to consider how the individual relates to collective trauma and, by extension, its politics:
and I do not remember
my hand finding the desk lamp
only the way to the moon
falling through the glass
This is entirely thanks to a classical literary device, the creation of a narrative author in the text that acts both as herself and every person, that evacuates the reality of the author’s existence allowing for us to stand in and reflect as the poem does:
and the human
who put out her hand
to steady herself
and found no walls
This takes the reader to an artificial space where collective trauma can be explored by a single person in isolation, creating the ideational freedom to interpret the events anew despite the unavoidably collective nature of the trauma.
In deleting the surrounding noise and selecting what remains, poetic responses like ‘rip’ compel us to consider the experience of sharing and digesting community-level trauma. This makes it possible to overlay this understanding of traumatic narratives on top of the socially-constructed collective trauma as it occurred and compare them. The difference between the two amounts to no less than the power of the public and socially-constructed interpretation on each of us and thus, ultimately, on political discourse.
Read the poems by Mariah Whelan.
Work that has informed Truth Tellers includes:
Tom de Freston is an artist and writer based in Oxford. He has been the holder or various prestigious fellowships and residencies, including a Leverhulme Residency at Cambridge University, the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University and a Levy Plumb Residency at Christ’s College. His multimedia projects have received funding from the AHRC, TORCH, the Fell Fund and Arts Council England. His most recent publication was a graphic poetic retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice (Bloomsbury Academic 2015). For details on past solo shows and reviews visit: www.tomdefreston.co.uk
Mariah Whelan is a poet and academic based in The Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester where she is writing a new collection of poems and researching trauma, memory and form in contemporary Irish fiction. Her poems and critical writing have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Writing in Education, The Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology and Best New British and Irish Poets. The manuscript for her first collection won the AM Heath Prize and will be published by Eyewear in October 2019. A second collection of poems exploring archival material from The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the writer’s own unconscious participation in discourses of white supremacy will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2020.
Dr Pablo de Orellana is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and Co-Chair of the KCL Research Centre in International Relations. His research focuses on the role of identity in diplomacy, nationalism, International Relations theory, as well as Art History. He completed his PhD in International Relations at King’s College London in 2016, specialising in how diplomacy constructs knowledge about political subjects. He has published articles on the history and mechanics of nationalist ideas, diplomatic communication, the role of identity in diplomacy, and an upcoming monograph on the diplomacy of the First Vietnam War. His latest work, for which Truth Tellers is a pilot, seeks to develop research collaborations at the Art-IR nexus.
Dr Christiana Spens is an academic and writer, currently teaching in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, and writing for various art publications such as Art Quarterly, Elephant and Studio International. Her first monograph, The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain, is published by Palgrave Macmillan (2019), and develops a method to research visual genealogy. She has also published several other books, both fiction and non-fiction. She is currently working on a novel that deals with themes of trauma, identity and relationships.
Exhibitions
For the textual aspect of this project, Mariah and Pablo brought together two very different ways of looking at any given political text. Pablo collected local, national and international news articles concerning the attacks and shared them with Mariah. At this stage Pablo applied a form of classical Poststructuralist discourse analysis called archaeology: he analysed how identities were constructed, framed and set in relation to others, locating the points at which identities, people were or were not politicised, identifying the subjectivity of that politicisation as well as its historical, political and contextual conditions of possibility.
At the same time, Mariah explored Manchester as a site of meaning, emotion, meaning-making and as the living city that survived the attacks. This exploration was geographical -there are multiple references to Mancunian locales in the poems- as well as textual and historical. This allowed her to enter the mind of the night, of the events, of those not involved but who also participated in that instance of collective emotion and traumatic selse-making. Her poems are the fruit of these observations. In writing them, Mariah reflected the images, words, and ideas of emotion she encountered:
Because I cannot show you
what is at the centre of all this
I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edge
the way I walked through the back of the crowd
too afraid to go in. (Square, 2019)
The poems make choices that political analysis cannot. For example, ‘rip’ ignores the discursive and informational environment of the aftermath of the attacks entirely. In this deeply individual sense-making, the poet creates a space where the politicisation of the event is altogether missing, where we the audience can decide what the emotions mean to themselves. This is by definition an artificial space that could only exist in literature. In constructing such ideational spaces, the poet selects what goes into them. This is a key part of how Pablo and Mariah collaborated: the free-playing artist chooses which representations, images, emotions and ideas enter or do not enter the world she writes. This selection is entirely subjective, of course, and on its own carries no scientific value. Its analytical potential resides in the aesthetic relevance that drew the artist’s gaze to these specific elements.
The artist’s gaze and its analytical instrumentalisation lie at the heart of this approach. We might call it artistic archaeology, for Pablo then performed in-depth discursive analysis of the poems exactly as if they were one of the original pieces of political text. Again, as with the original empirical evidence, the objective was to understand how it creates identities, political positions, narrates events, represents the city, community and made sense of trauma.
Poetry revealed itself as a powerful method to identify, retrieve, and isolate single themes of aesthetic power and significance into a page-shaped petri dish. Pablo’s analysis of the poem ‘rip’, for example, found that, though the collectivity of such a traumatic aftermath might be assumed, the poetic exploration forces the reader to consider how the individual relates to collective trauma and, by extension, its politics:
and I do not remember
my hand finding the desk lamp
only the way to the moon
falling through the glass
This is entirely thanks to a classical literary device, the creation of a narrative author in the text that acts both as herself and every person, that evacuates the reality of the author’s existence allowing for us to stand in and reflect as the poem does:
and the human
who put out her hand
to steady herself
and found no walls
This takes the reader to an artificial space where collective trauma can be explored by a single person in isolation, creating the ideational freedom to interpret the events anew despite the unavoidably collective nature of the trauma.
In deleting the surrounding noise and selecting what remains, poetic responses like ‘rip’ compel us to consider the experience of sharing and digesting community-level trauma. This makes it possible to overlay this understanding of traumatic narratives on top of the socially-constructed collective trauma as it occurred and compare them. The difference between the two amounts to no less than the power of the public and socially-constructed interpretation on each of us and thus, ultimately, on political discourse.
Read the poems by Mariah Whelan.
Principal Investigator
Pablo de Orellana
Lecturer in International Relations, Department of War Studies, War Studies Online Deputy Chair