“Yo lo vi” ([I Saw It] Goya, 1863). Art, Witness and the Many Ecologies of War

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Buckley, Bernadette. 2025. “Yo lo vi” ([I Saw It] Goya, 1863). Art, Witness and the Many Ecologies of War. In: Bernadette Buckley, ed. 32ª Bienal de Pontevedra: Being Human Again. Regarding the Pain of Others. Pontevedra: Bienal de Pontevedra. [Book Section] (Forthcoming)

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Official URL: https://bienal.depo.gal/en/a-32-edicion/volver-a-s...

Abstract or Description

The essay is a lead essay in the exhibition catalogue for the Bienal de Pontevedra, 2025.

Abstract:
The essay argues that the first task in understanding what Goya called ‘the disasters of war’ is not simply to ask how art or human beings succumb or respond to those disasters, but to figure out how the systems of which we are a part, are connected with them. Taking a post-humanist perspective, it argues that the ecosystem we call ‘war’ comprises not only of the dead bodies of soldiers and civilians blown to bits or starving to death in faraway lands, but also of the more-than-human bodies of resource management, enriched uranium deals, satellite systems, cybernetics, images and invisibilities, culture and trade wars, populisms, sanctions, difficult heritage, collective memories, weaponised immigration statistics.

All of these, the essay argues, are agentic entities, not simply subordinate to human intentionality and that, as such, they undermine, prompt and incite human agency in ways that are often unaccounted for in traditional analyses of war. They belong to a larger, leakier corpus that binds together both ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ entities. In this complicated system of entanglements, too large, too vast, too complicated for anyone to see, what exactly then, the essay asks, is a witness of war?

Item Type:

Book Section

Keywords:

art, war, conflict; post-humanism; ecologies of war

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Politics

Dates: