Memes ante el conflicto bélico: El montaje como relación visual de la guerra

Articulo

Summary

The present article intends to explore the relation between war, as a life-and-death experience, as well as the visuality related to it. The latter can be achieved by articulating the visual culture of war with a special technique: the montage. This will allow us to think of the analysed pictures as collisions of heterogeneous temporalities. If the experience war brings about must be thought of as disordered, therefore the visuality that comes with it cannot be a lineal one, but fragmented, shattered and (re)assembled. We are not talking about one particular war, but about the war experience as a whole. However, it is possible to find a special kind of picture within our contemporary visual culture which is often used to reflect on war –as well as to respond against it-: the Internet meme. In this paper, the meme will be put in dialogue with other seemingly unconnected images that are nonetheless part of the genealogy of these poor images (H Steyerl) that circulate through social networks and become viral. This is to say, memes belonging to the ongoing conflict in Syria will be part of a constellation that includes engravings by Francisco de Goya (19th Century) and the collages by Bertolt Brecht during the Second World War, so as to think of the montage as a way of knowing but also as a part of a visual culture of the war. This will help us understand how our images are filled with time and their genealogies, as well as their complex temporality, make them gain power.

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http://hdl.handle.net/11336/130730