Art and Embodied Human Rights Practice
For victims and witnesses of abuses, the lingua franca of the human rights practitioner can sometimes feel distant, remote, stubbornly immaterial. In this blog, Brian Phillips argues that artists can help re-centre the human body and the realm of the everyday in human rights practice.
Almuth Lutkenhaus (1930-1996), Crucified Woman (1976).
The heartbreak of human rights practice
For nearly thirty years now, their names, their faces and their stories have remained with me. Indeed, on most days, there’s still a part of me that feels like that young, intensely idealistic human rights practitioner immersed in my work on the issue of ‘disappeared’ and missing persons in the context of the violent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. I worked as a campaigner and educator for Amnesty International throughout the 1990s. Listening to grieving family members tell painful stories of the displacement and ‘disappearance’ of parents or children became a central aspect of my work during that decade.
In each of those encounters, I always explained as carefully as I could what Amnesty’s campaigning on the issue of ‘disappearances’ and missing persons was hoping to achieve. I would talk of our ongoing programme of advocacy on behalf of families of the ‘disappeared’ and missing, and of our commitment to securing the right to return for those forcibly displaced from their homes. I would discuss our strenuous efforts to compel relevant authorities to disclose information about the whereabouts of the missing. I also noted our steadfast lobbying of governments and international institutions to fund excavations of possible mass grave sites and outlined our longer-term agenda for bringing those responsible for these terrible crimes to justice. The families would listen to this information politely. But frequently, I could see in their faces a kind of wearied recognition that none of what I had to offer them could guarantee an immediate return of the bodies of those they had lost.
These were key moments in my formation as a human rights practitioner – searing instances of what I have often described to my students in the decades since then as ‘the heartbreak of practice.’ For I understood in those moments that no matter how crucial I believed the objectives of Amnesty’s campaigning to be, nothing of what I’d said with such ardour and confidence had touched their reality of loss and grief at the deepest level. In those moments, nothing in my hopeful practitioner’s vocabulary of words and terms like ‘advocacy’, ‘capacity building’, ‘civil society’ and ‘transitional justice’ really came anywhere near the concreteness of the absolute, material wound represented by a missing family member’s body. While I firmly believed that the initiatives I’d been speaking about had some wider significance for our efforts to support these families of the ‘disappeared’ and missing, I also realised that I must have sounded like I was speaking with what a Bosnian villager I would meet a decade later derisively referred to as ‘a mouthful of human rights’.
Against human rights abstractions
It was in moments like these that I became what we might call a human rights materialist. I became an impassioned convert to the belief that if we are to prevent the words and terms mentioned above (as well as the treaties and standards which provide the essential framework of our profession) from so easily mutating into mere abstractions, then they must always be linked directly in our work and in our speech to physical, material realities and forms – forms like the bodies of these husbands, sons, daughters. Our human rights practice must always be first and foremost grounded in this unwavering apprehension of human bodies: wounded bodies; broken bodies; unfed bodies; ailing bodies; outcast bodies; buried bodies. This should always quite literally be the starting point for we might call a more embodied human rights practice. Accountability; justice; a right to return – most definitely. But don’t forget the bones, the bodies. How do we human rights practitioners keep our minds fixed on the bones and bodies as well as on the benefits of advocacy?
A conception of human rights practice that defines and refines itself more explicitly in the material, the physical, the relational suggests to me a powerful bridge to the contribution artists might make to our investigation of possible new languages of rights in the twenty-first century. Can artists help us to place more of that reality of bones and bodies into human rights discourse and activism? Might an artist, through some remarkable exercise of imagination, communicate a more vivid, concrete sense of unspeakable loss and limbo than anything in the classic repertoire of the human rights practitioner?
The eloquence of a wound and traces of the everyday
When I look at some of the work of the Anishinaabe-kwe artist, Rebecca Belmore (born 1960 – Upsala, Ontario, Canada), or that of the Colombian artist, Doris Salcedo (born 1958 – Bogotá, Colombia), for example, I’m utterly convinced that the answer to this question is an emphatic ‘yes’. With remarkable eloquence, artists like Belmore and Salcedo display staggering insight into the most fundamental, material aspects of violation and loss – into flesh and hair and wound and sometimes, even a kind of hard-won recovery through the retention of little more than a scrap of cloth or some other token of remembrance.
Rebecca Belmore’s Fringe (2008) confronts the viewer with an Indigenous woman stretched out on what could be either a hospital bed or a mortuary slab – her naked back toward the spectator and revealing a stitched-up wound running diagonally from right shoulder to left hip. A series of sutures hang from the wound, with strands of beads strung along the length of each thread. The image is simultaneously shocking and beautiful. Belmore’s anti-portrait – with its breathtaking invocation of the Indigenous art of beading – immediately conjures up Turtle Island/Canada’s devastating reality of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls while at the same time, reminding us of the deep well of cultural traditions from which Indigenous women draw in their resistance to violence and discrimination. As curator and activist Wanda Nanibush has written, ‘the piece makes me think of the scars all Indigenous women carry as the consequence of being relegated to the fringes of society. Yet even there, we make community and beautify our world as much as we can’ (Nanibush, 2018: 12).
Doris Salcedo herself ‘…has conducted extensive interviews with victims of political violence, transforming their experiences into sculptures that convey a sense of how their everyday lives are disrupted.’ In one of her most powerful works on the legacy of decades of violent conflict in her country, Salcedo radically transforms objects of everyday life such as chairs, chests of drawers, and kitchen tables by imprisoning them in concrete – sealing them up against future use and embedding traces of the lives once lived amongst these objects (such as just-discernable bits of clothing) in some of the still-visible surfaces. The viewer is overwhelmed with a sense of time frozen; of voices muted; of all life activity suspended; of the realm of the domestic violated, despoiled; of all access to personal histories closed off forever. Salcedo’s choice of name for this work, a blunt Untitled (1989+), itself speaks volumes about that which is most inexpressible about human suffering.
Both Fringe and Untitled capture so much of what was most real, most profoundly human in my own encounters with the families of ‘disappeared’ and missing persons. In these unforgettable pieces, Belmore and Salcedo have perhaps provided a more authentic testimony to the lives of missing persons and the violence that ripped them out of the world than any I could ever utter with my ‘mouthful of human rights.’
References
Nanibush, W. (2018). Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario and Goose Lane Editions.
