We shout and shout, but no one listens: Art from conflict zones

Annotation

Taking as my starting point the catalogue of the exhibition We shout and shout, but no one listens: Art from conflict zones, I want to pay tribute to CAMP/Centre for Art on Migration Politics, which just closed after five years of stunning activity. I will directly quote from its official website: ‘CAMP was a non-profit exhibition space for art discussing questions of displacement, migration, immigration and asylum. The centre was operative from 2015 to 2020 and was located in Trampoline House, an independent community centre in Copenhagen that provides refugees, asylum seekers and ethnic minority Danes in Denmark with a place of support, community and purpose. CAMP produced exhibitions, events, publications and education programs about migration and the questions these phenomena gives rise to today.’ Being part of this environment gave me the possibility to meet and work with people from all over the world, and with artists and curators who proved to be inspiring practitioners and human beings. The point of departure of We shout and shout, but no one listens: Art from conflict zones was a number of ongoing and recent conflicts (at the time of the exhibition, in 2017) ignored by the international community, and it presented installations, photography, painting, readymades, collages and performance works examining war from the perspective of those trapped in or fleeing from zones of conflict. Among the external contributions to the catalogue, we find a piece from the American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, who coined the word ‘grievability’:

Beatrice Galluzzo

We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those we are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the glove into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others, even if it means taking those latter lives.