The evidential role of matter--when media records trace evidence of
violence--explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan,
Vietnam, and elsewhere.
In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept:
material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as
both registering external events and exposing the practices and
procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format
of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that
provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents
of dispute around which stake holders gather.
These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre
at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan
Milosevic; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a
South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive
contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the
accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or "disaster
film" produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of
Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter
exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can
be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or
what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will
be heeded or dismissed.
An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her
creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical
detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances
with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.
