Live coverage of violence — screenshots of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Israel, Syria, Serbia and Kosovo, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chechenya, Gaza, Afghanistan still under siege — are mediated through television and photographs for our detached gaze.
This is how trauma reaches us today.
When watching the news clips, we see hospitals overloaded with wounded victims, prisoners of war locked up in school bathrooms, or a soldier shooting a gun from a bedroom window. The news clips mediatise trauma as we view the broadcasts from a safe distance, from our own living rooms. But if you look closer, all of the clips have a common denominator: the backgrounds. They consist of tiles, wallpaper, gymnasiums, bedrooms, hospitals. They are domesticated-institutional-communal spaces that are perverted by war and violence. These are benign spaces that we also use in our everyday lives. This is not an anomaly; images of the civil war in Yugoslavia are saturated with images of all civil wars. You can no longer tell which war is which.
from the top: May 11, 1993 Mostar, Bosnia
A Croatian soldier fires his weapon out the bedroom window at Bosnian forces. Bosnian and Croatian forces fought a war for one year for control of central and western Bosnia.
Nov 29, 2012 Aleppo, Syria
A Free Syrian Army fighter in Al Amryia neighbourhood in Aleppo, watching from a bedroom window. During the civil war in Yugoslavia, we watched reporters interviewing widowers or childless mothers in their own living rooms, having to explain how they lost their husbands and sons and daughters.Viewers would see a staircase or pattered wallpaper in the background. Today when watching the news, we can see snipers shooting from bedroom windows, with floral wallpaper or damaged walls in the backgrounds.These symbols and manifestations of domesticity make you read both the inappropriateness of the action and its tragedy: the violation of domestic space or spaces that the community would be expected to occupy; not men with guns.
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left: The Museum. Bedroom Tunnel
Novka Cosovic
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