Research Lead:
Maevia Griffiths
HUD PhD Researcher
The University of Copenhagen
mlg@ifs.ku.dk

As part of HUD’s core research, its doctoral researchers are conducting independent projects extending our work in distinct and important directions. Below, Maevia Griffiths at the University of Copenhagen expands on her project.

The mechanization, reproduction and digitalisation of art and images in contemporary times has led to a continuous flow of instant news media, the live streaming of human suffering, and even 4K renditions of atrocities like genocide. To fight haunting feelings of numbness and fatigue, common among audiences to these images, humanitarians and other imagemakers of violence have had to readjust the dosage of horror, trying to sprinkling the formula with the right touch of hope to maintain audience traction, attention and naturally, financial donations. Within this complex affective spectrum, it is nonetheless challenging to pinpoint what actually moves people toward the betterment of the human condition.

This HUD doctoral project focuses on one common thread that subtly (or not) runs through almost all humanitarian and peacemaking discourses, visuals, and agendas—hope. While hope is a multi-dimensional and malleable concept, deployed in ways that range from nihilistic manipulation to naïve religious belief, and from the control of destiny to a practice of resistance and survival, this sub-project seeks to explore its anticipatory qualities in relation to representations of violence. Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s notion of the “not yet” moment, the aim is to balance hope’s abstract potential with its practical power to intervene and act on realities.

To examine how hope can move people, the project places hope in conversation with the concept of ‘presencing.’ Deployed in cultural and visual theory, the notion of presencing offers an experimental approach to moving beyond the homogenizing visual narratives that are often deployed in humanitarianism, and specifically humanitarianism for peace discourses. Instead, it has the potential to re-center alternative aesthetic practices as political interventions that help us better understand what motivates us to act. Specifically, the sub-project explores various film genres and cinema movements —such as experimental, docufiction, and essay films as well as third revolutionary cinema— that allow for non-representational and nonlinear engagements with forms of violence and/or hope that, though not our own, nevertheless resonate in profound ways.

At the core of the project is the intuition that as the world has become ever-more saturated with images of suffering, new ways of seeing the world are needed—ways that shift our perception beyond numb paralysis in the face of conflict and humanitarian crisis. The project attempts to generate such new ways of seeing the world by deploying filmmaking differently, moving away from ‘realist’ depictions of death and pain towards a ‘relational’ sensibility generating moments of presencing that affectively rupture our understanding of human suffering, attending to the voices, experiences, and ambivalent hopes of human beings.

Empirically, the project focuses on Colombia and reincorporation processes of former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) combatants into society. Specifically, it explores the politics of hope surrounding ‘Territorial Training and Reincorporation Spaces’ (ETCRs)— a network of ‘reincorporation’ camps created after the 2016 peace accords with the FARC guerillas. Some of these camps have turned into established communities and are critical spaces for understanding the achievements and mostly failures of reincorporation and peace-building processes in Colombia, as well as the ongoing violence and stigmatization faced by former FARC members. Through a combination of participatory observation and filmmaking, the sub-project will document how the politics of hope shapes and is shaped within these spaces of transition—moving from FARC camps in the mountains/’el monte’, to prisons (for some), to reincorporation spaces, and eventually into wider Colombian society. Approaching these sites through the lens of hope and engaging with them through non-representational forms of filmmaking opens up new forms of knowledge about repeated cycles of conflict and violence in these territories, and consequentially, about the human condition.

At its core, this sub-project hopes to shed light on these human stories in order to disrupt certain patterns of violence, as well as uncover how distant audiences are moved into acting to improve life in ways that challenge the stagnant apathy of contemporary society in the face of ongoing violence and the global crisis. Through this exploration of hope as practice, and as a dynamic force, the aim is to disrupt the exhausted stillness of our world and reimagine what it means to respond to suffering in ways that are both meaningful and transformative.