Not Now, But Soon: The Art of Portraying War
Our new miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.
On our final episode of this season, host Malka Older examines the role art and fiction play in understanding war. She talks with art and culture historian Brigitte van der Sande, who has spent 25 years studying how war is represented in art—research that brought her to many active conflict zones. Van der Sande discusses how art humanizes the victims of war and spurs action, and how humor and imagination can be forces for resistance.
Resources
- “Inside Hell We Build Paradise.” Read more about van der Sande’s visit to Rojava, Syria, as part of efforts to build democracy in the region.
- Check out Other Futures, a multidisciplinary festival that presents speculative visions of the future, founded by van der Sande in 2018.
- See artwork mentioned in this episode: “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita” and “Soft Target.”
- Learn more about van der Sande’s latest project, Culture House FKA the Cannibals.
- This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.
Transcript
Malka Older: For many people, the term “disaster” doesn’t include wars. In the popular understanding, disasters are linked to external, often unexpected triggers, like an earthquake or an industrial accident. One thing we’ve talked about a lot is how even those disasters that start with a natural hazard like a hurricane only become disasters when they intersect with human decisions. For most of the people affected by wars, those decisions weren’t theirs.
Welcome to Not Now, But Soon, a podcast miniseries about rethinking disasters. I’m Malka Older, a disaster responder, researcher, and speculative fiction author. Together, we’ll expand the idea of what a disaster is and what to do about it, and imagine how we can build a more robust, resilient future for all of us.
In our final miniseries episode, we’re talking about the role fiction plays in war and conflict. In these spaces, fiction can be a tool to document, reflect, reimagine, and reclaim. This is something Brigitte van der Sande, a curator and an art and culture historian has seen firsthand.
Brigitte, thank you for being here. I’m wondering when you say art historian and curator who studies war, is that something that you have to explain to people? Do people get it right away? How do you tell people what that means?
Brigitte van der Sande: No. People don’t get it at all because when they think of art and war, it’s always about Picasso, for example, the big painting in connection to the Spanish Civil War. But I’m actually never interested in one kind of depiction of war. I was really interested in imagining the unimaginable because especially for people in the West, war is something far away in the past or geographically. And I somehow felt the need to bring war closer to us because I do think that there are already for decades, rivers of discontent, polarization. It’s already started actually in the ’90s and especially in the beginning of 2000. So I wanted to open up perspectives on that war was not that far, but it’s actually very near and nowadays it’s even closer. It’s also opening up people’s eyes that it’s something we should be concerned about because nobody ever thinks we will have war in the Netherlands again after the Second World War.
I wanted to open up perspectives on that war was not that far, but it’s actually very near and nowadays it’s even closer.
Older: How does the connection with art make it more proximate, more close to people?
van der Sande: At a certain moment when you follow the media, it’s more about spectacle, the biggest bomb, the largest amount of dead people. And I think art— and I mean all the disciplines, not only visual arts, but every film and literature and every theater, everything you can imagine in artistic sense—that it gives a deeper insight into the motives of people to have war or to fight for peace. But I think artists can show you really in a very different way what war is for the daily life of people. Artists are really capable of touching people, not only mentally, but also emotionally, and they open up perspectives of what we can’t imagine being reality, even though we do see it on the television and we do see it in the media.
Older: Do you sometimes find it hard to get people to take art seriously? Are there people who say, “Oh, but it’s not real?”
van der Sande: Yeah, people always say, “Why is art even capable of showing something about reality like war?” And then I always say it’s not maybe about truth because that’s really becoming more and more difficult to understand what is true and what is not, but it’s about truthfulness, which is a very different way of thinking, because I think truthfulness is that you are allowed to use fiction because you somehow open another kind of truthfulness about emotional and scary subjects like war.
Older: We have this obsession now with fact checking, which is obviously really important when there are people who are lying to us—who are lying to us constantly—but there’s also things that cannot be conveyed just by listing facts.
van der Sande: The larger the groups of people are that die, the less we somehow can connect to it intellectually because people become numbers. And numbers don’t touch you. Well, if you hear the story of one person within those groups of people, it can really enter your heart and your mind. So I think that that’s the thing that media are not really capable of but art is.
The larger the groups of people are that die, the less we somehow can connect to it intellectually because people become numbers. And numbers don’t touch you.
Older: Are there any examples of pieces of art or exhibitions that come to mind that you can tell us to show how this works?
van der Sande: I did an exhibition in 2005 called Soft Target. That means us, humans, are soft targets. And there’s a work by Alfredo Jaar, a Latin American visual artist, and he had a work called The Eyes of Gutete Emerita, which was actually two screens, one eye on each screen. And you see this woman, she’s staring at you and you see her eyes. And even now I’m talking, I really get the chills again, because you see, her husband and children were killed in front of her eyes. And so you first, you are confronted with her eyes and then suddenly her eyes switched to the text that she has witnessed the death of her husband and children. And it pierced through everything when you see that. It’s making me emotional again when I think about it because it was so strong. We all can read about 800,000 people killed during the massacres in Rwanda because we, of course, as bystanders always witnessed things from afar. Alfredo Jaar knows how to bring it back to one personal story, which is actually symbolic for everyone who was killed there or saw people killed.
Older: It’s interesting to me thinking about the idea of scale, because the scale is also an important component, and yet, as you say, when we start to think about it, we lose the individual. And so how to keep both of those things at the same time? The story, the individuality, and then the size of something, the fact that this is happening? And as you said also before, the intentions that are behind it.I mean, all of these elements.
I think for most of us living in a world where there are so many terrible things going on, most of us have defenses built up to keep ourselves from despair or constant horror or constant mourning. So this question, as you say, of piercing through, getting to people to make this closer while we try to push it farther away.
van der Sande: I do think that it takes quite a long time before artists can really, truly make a good artwork because when you’re in it, it’s too gruesome. It’s too horrifying. I think everyone who grew up with parents or grandparents who were in a war, they know how long it takes for people to be able even to talk about it. And especially my grandparents never talked about it, even my mother had really a big difficulty. Only because I was working professionally and I wanted to make a documentary about our family, she was okay with that because she trusted me. But actually she hated talking about her war experiences as a child.
Even now, my generation is still working with the traumas of our parents and the grandparents. So you do know it takes a long time, but I think people like Lidiya Ginzburg was able to say, “Okay. There is a moment where our enemy can become a friend.” And I think the media will never say that. And you need an artist, a writer to say that.
Older: It’s also really interesting to me the mechanisms that are used to maintain the memory. So in the Netherlands, there is a moment of silence. In Paris, there are plaques all over the city in memory of resistance people and they have fresh live flowers in front of them. And I always wonder whose job it is to put those flowers there because at this point we’re talking about very few people still alive who remember it firsthand. So even if it’s family, it’s descendants, it’s people who weren’t there, but thinking about the mechanisms and how you keep those going in a society to say, “Yes, every year we’re going to do this.” And maybe some people ignore it, but a lot of people still do it, Or every year, we’re going to have someone in the, I don’t know, city hall or some ministry whose job it is to make sure there are always flowers there. And even if nobody looks, it’s there. And I don’t know, it’s fascinating to me as how we as people, as generations, can maintain these connections to things that have happened in the past.
van der Sande: The whole feeling of invincibility in the Netherlands is because we actually didn’t experience much war in 400 years. We only had the Second World War and I think about 10-day war with Belgium before they became an independent state. So that’s all our experience. And of course, Second World War was horrible for Dutch people who were not Jewish and catastrophic for all the Jewish Dutch people.
So that’s why I think the commemoration of war really does have a function, even if it’s only once a year for two minutes, the people really have to stand still and think and go to a ritual or go to a commemoration event because then at least they understand that still after so long after the war, we still have to memorize what happened then because it’s still working through our generations even now.
Older: I think the United States has a similar feeling of being isolated from war in vulnerability to war, even though it has participated in a lot of wars, but with a couple of exceptions that were now quite a long time ago, most of them were overseas. They were someplace else and it was only a certain segment of the population that really got that full trauma of being there. And I think that is really a problem for us and how in that distance that you mentioned, that sense of it’s far away.
van der Sande: And that changed on 9/11.
Older: It did to a certain extent, but I think we were able to kind of compartmentalize that and say, “This is terrorism.” And separate it from our actions and the war that came after that. Not everybody, of course. I mean, there are a lot of people who are military families, even if they didn’t go themselves. But my sense is that it’s quite a different feeling and our memorialization of war and of soldiers is quite different as well, maybe because of that.
It also makes me think about the question of perspective, where we societally sort of prioritize or where we accord truth and belief? I mean, thinking about Gaza, for example. There was a Palestinian journalist I heard speak who was saying that when she tried to report on what was happening, the major news outlets would say, “You’re biased. You’re too close because you’re Palestinian.” And so this idea of objectivity or of experts who have been to many different war zones and can go in and report with some sense of objectivity and sometimes it’s a question of translation or a question of people who are able to speak in a way that’s accepted as an official, formal, truthful kind of way of speaking. I think there are all these barriers sometimes to having that experience and the emotion behind it getting through to us.
One of the most problematic things is that we in the West only identify with people we recognize.
van der Sande: I think one of the most problematic things is that we in the West only identify with people we recognize. So like the whole war in Gaza, but also in Rwanda and other places that are, for us, not our immediate kind of spheres, that we have no interest in that it seems. Like Eastern Europe, which is much closer for a lot of people, which meant that all the Ukrainian refugees were housed, were able to work in the Netherlands. And that’s something I think we can tackle through the arts only by showing that other people do have eye for other histories and other people without voices.
Older: This dynamic that we are more likely to have empathy only with disasters we can imagine ourselves being affected by is not unique to human-made disasters like war. It’s also something I’ve seen time and again in my work on naturally triggered disasters. Disasters that affect a lot of tourists get more press coverage, more donations, and more relief.
I was in Sri Lanka during the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, and I was struck by how the international coverage focused on the tourists displaced during their beach vacations rather than the locals torn away from their homes. The donations for that disaster were so overwhelming that some organizations had to stop accepting funds for that effort, requesting only donations that could be redirected to one of the other pressing catastrophes in the world at that time. While the generosity was welcome, it also highlighted how uneven both media portrayals of events and the donations that accompany that attention can be. And that’s an area where art and fiction can make a difference.
So you said before that in these war zones, you found a lot of speculative art.
van der Sande: Yeah.
Older: Can you talk a little bit about that connection and also maybe some of the examples that you saw in conflict zones?
Both science fiction and speculative fiction really have a big role in empowering people who are otherwise not heard.
van der Sande: The first thing I noticed was writers of speculative or science fiction who were not censored because they were writing fiction and censors think, “Okay. Fiction, what’s the problem? I mean, it’s not reality, it’s not true.”
I saw that as a kind of alternative journalism, which I thought was really, really interesting. So that was one side, and the other was that there was one of the visits I did to Syria in Rojava where people were building academies and publishing poems which never been able to publish in Kurdish before. That was not science fiction or speculative fiction, but it does mean that people through the arts are able to imagine alternative futures, which is really important because first you have to visualize an alternative in the future and then you can create it.
I mean, that’s the only way you can do it, or you can rewrite history, which I also think is really a very strong characteristic of speculative science fiction. You can write yourself into the history where you were ignored or pushed out of. So in that sense, both science fiction and speculative fiction really have a big role in empowering people who are otherwise not heard.
Older: This kind of speculative art that you found in these war zones, were people imagining a kind of peace, a better life, a time after the war, a time when their community or their country was valid and respected and safe, or were they finding ways to write about the trauma and the war with the kind of twist of some kind of speculative thing to make it different enough to get through to people, or was it both?
van der Sande: Yeah. It was both. Yeah. The thing that I really find interesting, because that’s why I kept on making the distinction between science fiction and speculative fiction. For me, science fiction in the beginning, like, “What in the hell are people doing with science fiction in war zones?” That’s very technological, it’s very macho, it’s very Western. That’s why I prefer the terms speculative fiction, even though a lot of people don’t know what it means and that makes it difficult in a certain sense PR wise. But what I really found is that speculative fiction is much softer, more female, I think, and with a lot of humor, but you can also really make the war situation absurd. I think humor and imagination can really do a lot to also help trauma, but also make it a bit, lighter is a strange word in this context, but still… make it more your own, maybe that’s it. You have some kind of control over the narrative.
Older: Yes. And I think also so often the oppressor or the side that has so much power is entirely humorless because there is a fear of being laughed at. And so it’s also a kind of resistance response to that, prying away at the cracks in this façade of power and smoothness and lack of errors and really horrifying.
I mean, it’s almost an uncanny valley sort of horror of people saying, “Yes. We can actually make human systems function without error.” I mean, this is horrifying if you really think about it. As much as people say they want the trains to run on time, but actually to think of a society that doesn’t have mistakes, that doesn’t have flaws, that doesn’t have humor, this is a horrifying thing because it’s inhuman.
van der Sande: Yeah. Exactly. Because humor is human. Yeah. That’s what I think also.
Older: And actually I’m quite interested in your take on this gendering of science fiction versus speculative fiction, especially since I write… I feel like I’m writing focusing on the soft sciences, which is also a terrible maybe way to describe them, but thinking about the social impacts and thinking about the way that humans react to new technology as opposed to trying to actually do a schematic of the technology itself. But what is your definition of speculative fiction?
van der Sande: Well, actually it’s science fiction without the hard macho technological approach. I actually departed from science fiction because I thought it would scare people away like me because I do like science fiction, but only a particular kind like the books you write. So that’s for me the big difference.
Older: I like to use the term speculative fiction as a way to talk about science fiction, fantasy, and similar genres like alt history altogether, because they’re all ways to tell stories unconstrained by literal realism. It’s also useful because so often people have biases about these different genres. People often think of science fiction as somehow more realistic and relevant than fantasy, but there’s plenty of fantasy that is incredibly sharp about politics or post-colonialism or anthropology and plenty of science fiction that is more about telling a good story than drilling down into frameworks and theories.
As a science fiction writer for whom the science part tends to focus more on so called soft sciences like sociology rather than what are known as hard sciences like astrophysics, I’m well aware of these biases and I worry about how much we miss when we prioritize certain kinds of knowledge and insight over others.
van der Sande: I think we actually should claim the word soft because I’m reading now an American book, How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. And they really show you that the soft powers are so important also within governments, but also working with countries from other parts of the world. So I think we should claim soft all the time where we should be entering the era of softness that would be wonderful.
Older: I think we should. I think we should be paying so much attention to the social sciences because when we ignore them, we do so at our peril. And yes, we should enter our soft era and we should be thinking about the soft parts of power, science, fiction, all of these things.
van der Sande: Yeah. I agree.
Older: Thank you for listening. This is the last episode of this season of Not Now, But Soon. I hope it inspired you to think more expansively about disasters and what we can do about them. If you enjoyed this series, please tell all your friends and let us know by writing to us at podcast@issues.org, or reaching out to us on social media.
Thanks to our audio engineer, Angelina Mazza and our podcast producers Kimberly Quach and Mia Armstrong-López. Music for this series was created by Stuart Leach. Not Now, But Soon is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a collaboration between Issues and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination. Additional editors on the Future Tense Fiction Project include Joey Eschrich, Andrés Martinez, and Ed Finn.