Revisiting and Renegotiating Wars: The Potential of Political Subjectivization in Anri Sala’s Film 1395 Days Without Red

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Solveig Gade
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3570-2147

Abstract

Anri Sala’s film 1395 Days Without Red (2011) provides a kind of reenactment of an accidental day during the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo. Shot in today’s Sarajevo, the film revisits and embodies some of the widely circulated images of the siege, such as inhabitants sprinting across so-called Sniper Alley in order to avoid the bullets of the Bosnian Serbian snipers positioned around the city. Based on a close reading of Sala’s work, this article will scrutinize how subjectivating techniques of power, during times of war, affectively work to create boundaries between those excluded from and those included within humanity. Conversely, focusing on how these techniques are being questioned within the work, I will discuss the resistance potential of what I will refer to as practices of subjectivization. Eventually, I will seek to position the “war-critical” strategy of the work within a broader context of the late modern war paradigm.

Keywords: Anri Sala, War, Critical art, Siege of Sarajevo, Manhunt, Affect, Political subjectivization, Late modern war paradigm

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