In a time when the very last Holocaust witnesses will soon be gone, a possible route for commemoration is to ask what testimony images can give. This book seeks to answer the question of how images can bear witness by examining them as multifaceted entities produced, reproduced, and resituated in conflicting political and historical situations. In three archive-based films by Harun Farocki, Yael Hersonski, and Eyal Sivan, the moving image is reactivated and reinterpreted. Footage produced as internal Nazi propaganda and the video recordings of a politically charged trial in the aftermath of the Holocaust have accrued new meaning. The archival status, context, and conditions for production, and the means of representation, offer a framework for an analysis through which the testimony of images can be understood. 

I tre arkivbaserade filmer av Harun Farocki, Yael Hersonski och Eyal Sivan reaktiveras och omtolkas rörliga bilder från Förintelsen. I en tid då de sista vittnena snart kommer att vara borta inställer sig frågan om vad för slags vittnesmål bilder kan ge för att bevara minnet. I den här avhandlingen undersöks rörliga bilder som komplexa enheter som producerats, reproducerats och resituerats i skilda politiska och historiska situationer.

Råmaterial som producerats som nazistisk propaganda respektive videoinspelningen av en politiskt laddad rättegång i Förintelsens efterspel får en ny mening. Materialens arkivstatus, kontext och produktionsvillkor, liksom deras representation, ger ett ramverk för en analys genom vilken bilders vittnesmål kan förstås.

This anthology takes its starting point in the conviction that a phenomenologyof pregnancy could play an important role in contemporary thought. Stating this is also an acknowledgment that it doesn’t play such a role—yet. The aim of this anthology is to contribute to making philosophical reflectionon pregnancy a greater part of the discussions to come.

This introductory article is structured around the following themes: it begins with a brief overview of some important works that have paved the way for the present discussion (Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Adrienne Rich and Iris Marion Young). This is followed by a critique of the concept of “experience” and the philosophies based on it (such as phenomenology), that was first presented by feminist thinkers Joan Scott and Judith Butler in the 1980’s. The question this debate poses to the discussions in this book is whether focusing on experience is still a philosophically viable option. After that, the views of Edmund Husserl – often described as “the father of phenomenology” – are presented on the particular themes of motherhood and pregnancy, as it is often overlooked that he had anything to say on the topic. Then follows a short outline of the structure of the experience of pregnancy, and also the modest suggestion that pregnancy should be seen not only as “split subjectivity” (Kristeva, Young and others) but also as a specific mode of phenomenological “in-between.” Thereafter the question is taken up whether pregnancy as a philosophical topic might also affect the methodological core of phenomenology. The article ends with a speculative outlook towards certain themes that have developed as a consequence of thinking pregnancy philosophically. 

Roland Persson’s new exhibition, The Phenomenon of Materializing a Dream, is his most ambitious endeavour so far, with clear links to his previous work in silicone and yet displaying literally new dimensions. While Persson previously has shown objects, whether single, compounds or in series (flowers, mushrooms etc.), he now exhibits five full-sized rooms that you are invited to walk around in: floors, walls, a ceiling (in one of the rooms) plus a wealth of objects that he has fitted into them, all in silicone. As is often the case with Persson’s work, it is not a mere reproduction of things already known but the creation of another world, bearing a strange resemblance to things as we know them but distorted (in colour, in form) in different ways. The result is a shock on the senses, as one is virtually engulfed in this strange world.