Voids of Meaning: Images and War Memories

Abstract

My work here is concerned with images of war and their impact on the idea of a city. My point is that in a society geared to the free home delivery of sensible reality, the visible images tend to be gradually drained of their invisible essence. They are consequently deployed in the total visibility of the represented objects, that are existing here and now, but they evoke no memory and they pass in the blink of an eye. This appears particularly evident when referring to the contemporary metropolis in the neverending contingency of war. We negotiate the reality of the cities \u2013 writes Donald - imagining \u2018the city\u2019 (Donald 1999: 18). However negotiation is made unfeasible when multiple representations of cities at war are made into one: a place which is everywhere and nowhere, an archetype, a global myth, soon to be memorized \u2013 and forgotten - as such. This atopical place (Hillis Miller 1995) neutralizes history, erases singular and unique stories and may produce an urban landscape which is entirely fabulous and therefore failing to be dangerous: a place of ruins where any sense of cause and effects is often glaringly omitted. When trying to recover a representation where the hidden human geography of power is made visible, therefore, we are obliged to focus on marginal points of view, dissonant and disturbing versions of the city at war. This is the ratio underlying my selection of texts. Two of them, Winterbottom\u2019s Welcome to Serajevo (1997) and Sacco\u2019s Safe Area Goradze (2000) are closely related: they describe the same war, they refer to roughly the same geographic area, they are set more or less in the same period. Jarman\u2019s The Last of England, instead, does not refer to any real at war, but it symbolically enacts the final extinction of the British Empire, five years after the Falklands war and it seems to anticipate the extremely real \u201cFallujah London\u201d of I.Sinclair (2006).\u2019 Introducing the concept of he city as an idea to think politics\u201d (Donald 1999)