Vanessa Beecroft – Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf?

http://www.museomagazine.com/938552/VANESSA-BEECROFT

http://www.vanessabeecroft.com/frameset.html

Performances 2007

Sophie has written an essay on trauma, witnessing and performance art, entitled ‘Trauma, Bodies and Performance Art: Towards an embodied ethics of seeing’. The paper addresses the problem of (un)ethical spectatorship of the traumatized body by engaging with the theory and practice of contemporary performance art. Rejecting the fantasy of the ideal moral witness, Sophie turns to models of embodied spectatorship suggested by performance-body art to propose ways of seeing that acknowledge and accept the necessary ambivalence of the distant spectatorship of suffering, while at the same time promoting a sense of ‘response-ability’ and self-reflection. It can’t be posted here because of publisher’s rights but you can read in the journal ‘Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies’ (2010) and in the paperback book Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media. M. Broderick and A. Traverso (eds.), Routledge (2010). She will also be blogging on this topic as her thoughts develop.