Introduction to the Arts

Abstract

What can art bring to situations of violence? How does it provide an alternative means to our usual habits of mind and memory? In this introduction to Part IV, Mary Zournazi discusses how art can serve as a place holder to understand and reflect on violence without reproducing it. She discusses how art is a means for social healing reflecting on Bruce Clarke’s chapter on the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and its legacies; and how art provides a way to address the ‘unthinkable’ in our cultures. In her chapter, Zournazi reflects on how cinema can allow a space to approach and respond with sincerity to tragic events, and through her film Dogs of Democracy (2016) she provides an alternative response to the humanitarian crisis in Greece.

One comes not into a world but into a question.

Emmanuel Levinas