Abstract
War is a highly visual and sensual affair—as is a prison sentence—yet the testimonies of those who have experienced both are rarely disseminated in aesthetic forms. In their contribution the authors start from the premise that the experiences of the convicted veteran require new forms of thinking and analysis. Drawing on the recent video production of The Separate System (2017)—produced jointly by professional artists and veterans-prisoners—they stress the importance of thus co-produced artworks in the field of artivism (or activism through art) with veterans of warfare. Artivism produces images—in a wide variety of shapes and forms—that could have the potential to significantly and directly affect the bodies of their (un)intended spectatorships and audiences by sharing some (however little) of the veterans’ experience. Moreover, the artivist process itself, which involves veterans and artists working together on the artwork, may have healing or restorative potential: in mobilising the body and in engaging and communicating with others working through and expressing past experiences, veterans and artists alike are inevitably required to take into account of the outside world (i.e. the destination of the images that they are producing), to make communicative connections, to make ‘experiencing together’ possible, to reconstitute communal life, and to actually ‘build world’.
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Notes
- 1.
The Separate System (2017). Katie Davies with Andy, Billy, Callum, Danny, Gaz, Gaz, Jay, Jonno, Mark, Mark, Paul, Rob and Trevor. Commissioned and produced by FACT. Supported by the Armed Forces Covenant Fund and Paul Hamlyn Foundation. With thanks to HMP Altcourse and HMP Liverpool. Available at https://vimeo.com/228801873.
- 2.
The Reimagining the Veteran research group is a strand of the ‘artivism’ project at the Centre for Crime, Criminalisation, and Social Exclusion (CCSE) at Liverpool John Moores University.
- 3.
At an event entitled ‘To Serve’ in April (2017) The Separate System was premiered at FACT through a single screen production. Chaired by Emma Murray, a public Q and A followed this screening, taking the form of a conversation between criminology, SEA and FACT’s community programme.
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Murray, E., Davies, K., Gee, E. (2019). The Separate System? A Conversation on Collaborative Artistic Practice with Veterans-in-Prison. In: Lippens, R., Murray, E. (eds) Representing the Experience of War and Atrocity. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13925-4_8
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