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Material Witness, Susan Schuppli, Goldsmiths University

Material Witness is a multi-year project that explores the evidential role of matter as both registering external events as well as exposing the partisan practices and procedures that enable such materials to testify publicly. Material witnesses are non-human entities and machinic ecologies that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into a history. In working with this concept, I examine a wide range of materials from human-made to naturally-occurring that record trace-evidence of the violence, which generated their contemporary contexts and explore the forums and protocols that enable their latent histories to be rendered visible and made to speak. Within the context of Forensis I focus specifically upon evidence sourced from the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia which contains more than 9.3 million objects, including videos, audio recordings, photographs, aerial imagery, X-rays, diagrams, floor plans, models, maps and even remnants of charred timber and stone. What happens when media and other non-textual evidence enter into war crimes proceedings as a “material witness” entrusted with the task of testifying to history? Which impact does the court’s processing of media materials have upon their evidentiary capacity to produce the truth claims that are required for “the justice of law” to answer to “the injustices of war”.

online extracts from the full video available here