 Good morning. I'm Lisa. I'm the head of the Institute. We're so pleased to welcome everyone to the third day of our global symposium. What we want to do in this first session today is to talk about the way that art and the issues that all of us are here to work on and to examine, explore and do something about what that intersection is. It's going to be a very special session led by the exceptional ambassador, Megan O'Brien, who is the co-chair of the Institute's Women Building Peace Council. Every year, USIP awards an exceptional women peace builder from the front lines. And there is a council that oversees this process and the ambassador leads that council. Megan is currently the director of art in embassies at the US Department of State. We're also very pleased to welcome Padraga Otwama, who is the poet in residence at the Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University, a long-time friend of this Institute, and a person who has a distinguished track record in building peace. The panel includes a wonderful group of colleagues, the director of the exhibition right outside our doors, Nobody's Listening, Ryan D'Souza. We're very pleased to welcome as well the co-director of the Global Challenges Research Fund Gender Justice and Security Research Hub at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka, Nilipur Damal. We have with us the co-director of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University Professor, Nayanki Mukherjee. And we have the director and the producer of Artworks Projects and Mirror Studio, Leslie Thomas. Thank you for being here today. Padraga, with your permission, I'm handing the floor to you to start our program. Thank you very much, and it's lovely to be here. Thank you for the invitation and the possibility of being here. I'm checking my watch so I don't go on too long. I'm going to read some poems, poems that are reflecting on peace and conflict and trauma and the body and yeah, I'm interested in what a poem is. And why it has occurred in every human culture. There isn't a culture without poetry. There isn't a culture without art. The Scottish poet Don Patterson says that a poem is a little machine for remembering itself. And when we're in a situation, when we're speaking about violence, sexual violence, trauma, what we know is that people have been dismembered from themselves. And when you look at the word dismember, as the antonym to remember, you're reminded of the etymology of the word member, which speaks about the body. To remember is not just a cognitive act. It is a physical one, to be remembered in a certain sense is to be put back together. And everyone here knows that violence, sexual violence, trauma is a thing that takes you apart, that threatens to split, and that, in fact, sometimes does split. Sometimes it might even be more emotionally true to say that what we're trying to do, rather than only remember, is to re-sense or to re-feel. And why would you want to do that? Perhaps forget is sometimes the desire. Except over and over again, what we see is that people in situations of having survived something that never should have survived, are wished to express rage and resistance and protest, as well as creativity, some exertion of identity that goes beyond being identified solely and only for the worst thing that's happened to you. A poem is a relationship with time, the past, the present and the future. And in that, what we see is that always time is an identity that occurs in a poem and I could say the same thing as survivor of sexual violence myself, and many of us here are and many of us here work in these environments, that an assertion of the self is a relationship with time too, the past that's remembered, the present that's being remembered, and the future too, that is trying to be remembered. I'll read a few poems, but before I do I just want to say one phrase in Irish, Gaelic, some people call that language, we call it Irish when we're speaking in English. Erskó, a Gaela war snidina, is a powerful phrase, an old saying, an old proverb, translating as it is in the shelter of each other that the people live. One of the things that violence does is to isolate and one of the things that art does is to seek, not to say we're the same, we're not, not to express a universal voice, there isn't one, but rather to say that there somehow is a shared shelter that can be found in the emotive language of art, whether that's in visual arts, performative arts, body arts, all kinds of arts. I have a sequence of poems about two victims of trauma, sexual trauma, meeting each other, it's two mythological victims, that mostly these mythological victims will be known to people through world myths, they recognize each other and they stumble towards each other trying as victims themselves, but still not knowing how to speak about themselves or to each other. One of the characters is Persephone who in Greek mythology was abducted by Hades and dragged down into hell and she's made to live there every winter when she comes out spring erupts from hell and the other character is Jesus of Nazareth who was dragged, stripped and probably raped too by Roman soldiers in the Praetorium, a reference that even the Gospels are quiet about and can't quite articulate, these two meet at a gate outside the Garden of Hell, at a gate outside hell and here's some of their conversation. On the nature of forgetting, she'd seen his wounds, who couldn't, but she knew she shouldn't ask until he'd settled down a little, so she watched, waited, saw how he always kept his knees a little bent while he was standing, keeping balance on the front part of his feet, muscles of his ass and thighs a little light, a little tense, he always kept his eyes on the horizon, planning his escape. She looked at his bare back, his side, his mangled ankles, his chest gasping like he couldn't take much breath but needed to take more breath. Who did this to you? She said at last. I forget, he said. Forget or won't remember, she asked. Is there a difference, he said? Yes, she said. I can see you need to talk, so tell me, if not me, anyone, anything, the sky, the earth, a fucking tree, can't he said? Don't want to either. This next poem is called Whomsoever Shall Deny Me, I Shall Also Deny me. And you, he said, who did this to you? The one who did it said he didn't have a choice, she said. He said nature or an arrow is what made him do this, made him make me this. I reject such fates, I reject that story. That's why I know I can only stay with you a while, though it upsets me. You haven't died enough yet. Here's another one. See from his head, his hands, his feet. I saw you back at the gate again last night, she said. What keeps you returning? Were you following me, he said, or do you dream of going back down too? It's different for me, she said. I'm tired to seasons. I need to feel, he said. And when I go there, I begin to bleed, my hands, my head, my feet, my back too a little. I don't know why, but my blood appeases me. Don't judge me. Sometimes I doubt I ever went there, got out from there. I question everything that came before. So this helps. It makes no sense at all, but it helps. Part of the question of why I want to quote that phrase, it is in the shelter of each other that the people live, is that sometimes the personas that come through us through religion or mythology can be like an avatar, a mask, a persona, not to hide behind, but in fact they reveal the truth. They are the apocalypse that lifts the veil that says something true. And these word myths have come to us for the purpose of engagement. And through the art of mythological making and then the art of mythological remaking, what we can often find is that there is an old story wishing to be told again and again and again because it is so necessary. And the arts in this context have been prowling around the topics to do with violence and recovery from violence and the cessation of violence for as long as there have been arts. So thank you. I'm proud to be Irish. I think we can take the lights down again. My mother used to say, you wouldn't be Irish if you didn't know the world was going to break your heart one day, which was I think a Yates mangled reference. But thank you all so much. Please kindly let you know that I am the director of the office of art in embassies at the State Department. And a lot of people don't even know that we do this and most countries don't. But we curate for every United States ambassador a custom art exhibition to support the diplomatic imperatives that they know they will address in those important bilateral meetings that take place in those residences. And what we like to say is that art, this is inartfully said after listening to you, that art can make you feel what a diplomat can only try to make you understand. And so it is incredibly powerful. And I am so happy that our country recognizes that and that this program survives after 60 years. And today, of course, we're talking about art in the context of healing and reconciliation. And that also is apparent as an important aspect of the arts. The Pentagon deploys art to heal our veterans. Studies show that patients that have an artwork in their room recover twice as fast. So doctor orders get some art if you're in the hospital. When government mental health facilities shut down in California, some very wise artists put together centers called creative growth centers where people with developmental disabilities and mental illness came and artists were there to help them create, create, create out of their pain and out of their mental state. And the art that they have created is incredible. In fact, it went on an international tour about 15 years ago. It was called the Museum of Everything. And it has now been at the MoMA, at the Smithsonian. And I'm happy to say we just created a collection that we announced a month ago for the State Department. So those artworks will be available to U.S. ambassadors. So today we have amazing panelists that will be looking at how can art help to prevent, address, and ameliorate the result of conflict-related sexual violence. And in a side note, and Leslie and others will be talking more about this later, if we're talking about healing, we need to keep in mind first, do no harm. And so we'll be looking at some of the very strategic ways we have to think when art is created or any content is created around these issues. And Padreak, your recitation was wonderful. And I know that as we're talking about peace, the Good Friday agreements figure into your illustrious career, can you tell us a little bit about having the poet at the table? I mean, in what way did you engage with those agreements? And what are your impressions of those that sustainable agreement as an artist? I got more involved in the questions to do with peace a little bit after that. I was obviously following along. But I was working as a poet in residence and as a conflict mediator with a lot of different peace organizations in the years after the Good Friday Agreement. One of the things that I think is really important in poetry is the blank space. When you look at a page of poetry, there's a lot that's not said. And that is an indication of a relationship between what can be said and what can't be said, the sayable and the unsayable, and the void, the nothing from which we all came. And one of the things that I think is lasting and powerful in the Good Friday Agreement is that the introduction to it says that the question about peace and the sovereignty of Ireland has been failed by successive British governments and Irish governments, and that it will not be solved by a four-year term of any government, and therefore the blank space of saying, to whom do we turn? And what it is that the Good Friday Agreement constitutionally says is that sovereignty of the island of Ireland belongs to the people of Ireland, and the introduction to the peace agreement says, therefore in a spirit of concord, we commend this agreement to you for voting in a supermajority on both sides of the border. Concord, in a spirit of concord, spirit, coming from the word spirari, meaning breath, and concord, coming from the word cordia, meaning heart. Breath and heart, that this is political language. And that, I think, is one of the things that, to my mind, is sustaining about that extraordinary and flawed and nonetheless extraordinary agreement. I wish that more of the British politicians would read the damn thing, because so few of them do. So many of them do not know the peace agreement that their own country has signed up to, and therefore can go ahead and say things that are plainly against the treaty. And this, for me, is a call to the art of close reading, whether that's a constitution, whether that's a book of poetry, or whether that's a peace agreement. Language matters, and if the language is good enough, it can shape us. So in the recitation that you did, you said to be remembered is to be put back together. And that seems relevant to what you were just saying. And remembering has, and that's sort of what we do with art, is that we're representing something, and it comes from a memory. Yeah. I mean, in so many places, conflict has come along with separating people from themselves, separating your body from yourself through sexual violence, separating your tongue from yourself through colonial violence of taking a language away and forcing people to negotiate for their safety in a language that isn't their first. Separating your neighbor from your neighbor through partition. These are all items of separation and isolationism on the level of policy and on the level of practice. These are technologies that larger countries have been perfecting for centuries in terms of the way that they go about separating people from people on the level of individual and on the level of community. And so reconciliation is not a soft, easy word out on the edge. It's a radical word that says we believe in integration and what integration can do to be integrated back to the language that was taken away from you, to be integrated back into the body that was separated from itself through sexual violence, to be integrated back into the community that has been split apart in a divide and conquer mechanism. That reconciliation is a radical commitment and not something pretty that comes along later on. It's gritty and painful and complicated and demanding. And in this context, there's the metaphor to the body. To the body. And I think that's perfect for what we're talking about today. And the other line that hit me was, made him make me this, that fractured state. Yeah. That's Persephone speaking there. Her story is, in the Greek myth, you know, in the earliest rendition of it, she's overheard when Hades has taken her. And Hades says, oh, I was stung by Erasso. I didn't have a choice. But the first thing that Persephone has heard to say is a rape, a rape. And so, and she was appealing for a help. These are thousands of years old. These, these, these myths that were passed down through oral culture and then written down later on. And what you, what you hear is that she is looking for witness and declaring the truth. And those are constantly denied and denied and denied. And so, when she is saying he, you know, here's the story he tells, and here's what he's made me, she is trying to make a declaration to say somewhere I believe I can be different than this too. And truth is so important. And I think it, this is such a phenomenon that is, depending on the culture, shrouded in a great deal of shame and cultural denial. And we see truth challenged so much these days all over the world. I'd love to know as a poet with your reverence for words and their power, how you'd like to comment on that. Well, I think of the word valid, valid French for truth and the way that in English, and this is, this is terrible language, but the way that the word invalid is been used then to say something untrue, untruth. And I would never use that word to refer to a person. But we, there's something about the physicality of not being believed of the truth of somebody saying this happened, of that being invalidated. It has the, it has the tone of erasure, it has the tone of silencing and complete denial. It's not just somebody saying, well, go through the forensic truth of it. It has the sense of saying you were untrue as a result of that. And we know that the dignity of sexuality when that is violated on a systemic level. And then when the, that violation is denied and when it's used as a weapon of war, the long-term consequences of that need to be paid attention to, as well as then the long-term need for art and declaration and reclamation and the power to, because in as much as we have traumas that stay with us forever, we also have powers that stay with us forever. And we can reckon with those provided there's a space to do it. And those spaces shouldn't just be in quiet corners, just for victims. They should be in larger public spaces because they've happened on a public sphere. Well, we are in a public place and there is a quiet corner where you can go to a virtual reality production that exposes the truth of genocide in Iraq. And our next guest is Ryan D'Souza, who, please join us, who created the art exhibition. I hope all of you have been able to see. It is an incredible piece of work and it is representative of a career that Ryan has had in exposing the truth and giving it power. And I'm going to let you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this work, Ryan. Thank you so much. Is this on? I believe so. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Megan. And thank you to Kathleen and Lisa and the US Institute of Peace for hosting this critically important conference. I think I've been dealt the shortest straw having to follow a poet laureate. So I'll do my best to be as eloquent and intelligent as Patrick. Probably not, but I'll do my best. So my name is Ryan. I'm the curator of the Nobles Listening exhibition, which is downstairs. And I encourage everyone here to try and visit when you have some time. Nobody's Listening is a innovative art and virtual reality immersive exhibition that aims to refocus international attention back on the situation facing communities affected by ISIS, Yazidis, Christians and others, and to highlight the ongoing plight of survivors and the affected communities and to amplify their calls for justice and recognition for the genocide committed against them. I just also want to say it's been a privilege of a lifetime to work alongside Yazid, who are a Yazidi charity based in Iraq and the US and around the world, and the Yazidi Survivor Network, which is a group of formidable women, human rights activists, Yazidis and survivors of sexual violence, every step of the way in developing this innovative multimedia initiative. I also want to confess that I am officially the worst art curator and the biggest imposter here, because I don't work in the arts world. My background is very much in the human rights advocacy campaigning world, working for NGOs and the United Nations. In 2016, I had the pleasure of working with Ms. Nadia Murad and Yazid on efforts to mobilize the Security Council to bring ISIS to justice, and then for my sins I left New York where I was working and went to Somalia and I was based in Mogadishu for two years, working for the United Nations, and I left in 2019 and came back to London somewhat frustrated and depressed with the state of the United Nations and human rights advocacy. No disrespect to anyone working for the UN here, just my own beliefs. I kind of do believe that we are living in a world which is desensitized to atrocities. We see it too often on social media and also I feel that we suffer from a lack of empathy and attention span, so I wanted to see how can we use art and virtual reality and integrate a human rights campaign into it to deliver these messages and inspire political action. And the result has been the Nobles Listening Exhibition. The artwork featured in the exhibition are by survivors and artists from the affected communities, and this is very much a forward-leading exhibition where they don't need to talk about what happened to them but really about the situation today and what needs to happen going forward. But the centerpiece of the exhibition, as Megan mentioned, is our virtual reality experience. It's 10 minutes long, it talks about life before the genocide, what happens during the genocide and situation today. We filmed everything in Iraq and you get to walk around the scenes where the crimes took place and everything you listen to is based on the existing testimony. I just want to quickly talk about some of the impact and also some of the research outcomes that we've seen as a result of the virtual reality and I think the greatest impact that I've seen is when we've been able to show the VR to decision makers and the general public alongside survivors and so we premiered the virtual reality thanks to funding from USAID and the UN to premiere this in the Iraqi parliament in 2019, sorry 2020 and basically the deputy speaker of the parliament was like oh what's this all about come show it to me in my office and so he went to go show it to him in his office and there were three survivors of sexual violence there and essentially this politician was chastising them before doing the VR saying oh you women need to be stronger stop dwelling in the past and look forward to the future and you know and all this kind of horrible stuff and it was wonderful to see the change the 180 degree change after he did the VR where he essentially was apologising to them after feeling what they went through and said he would do more to help them and so I think that was one of the the nicer moments and actually very kindly a survivor did say to me afterwards it was the first time she felt that she had been listened to so that there was an encouraging moment and one of the inspirations to continue moving this along as much as possible we've also been able to show the virtual reality with survivors to foreign ministers and other decision makers and the other outcomes has been governments recognizing the genocide support and funding been given to provide mental health support for survivors and also one foreign minister actually visited Iraq to meet with the survivors in the refugee camp and I don't think you know it's only because of the VR it's a combination of showing the VR and creating that level of empathy and being able to do it with the survivors who then can talk about their situation and engage the decision makers in a more engaged manner. In terms of research USAID also provided funding for a research project which was led by Dr. Professor Rosin Muhammad Amin from the Polytechnic University of Soleimani in Iraq her team showed the VR to over 120 participants in five cities across Iraq and the key outcomes were 70.8% of the 120 responders indicated that the experience changed their previous knowledge and impressions about the AZDs and 92.2% of participants highlighted the need for the justice for the AZD course as well. We're also working with Kings College London and the UK Defence Academy on a separate research project to see how we can use this type of virtual reality experience to train military personnel on civilian protection issues as well so that's ongoing right now and so we'll see what happens. Given the level of expertise in this room I very much encourage you all to try the virtual reality experience and we'd be very grateful for your feedback as well. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm sure many of them having been here the last couple days have experienced it. What surprised me was that you did a tour across Iraq and I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. You talked about how the officials reacted to it. I'd love to hear how the people reacted to it. Yeah no it was an interesting one. We took a demo of the VR to to Iraq and it was interesting there's a Christian priest who I showed it to who whose village was occupied by ISIS and he suffered as well and he said oh when he did the VR I said like oh I had no idea the AZD suffered like this and so it was interesting that you know that people who have all suffered still kind of view their own trauma from their narrow prisons again everyone has suffered in Iraq but the specific crimes that took place the AZDs still haven't been fully recognised and understood by their neighbours as well and so when we showed the VR we also took it to the University of Baghdad and again it was interesting there the number of people who responded that these are students PhD students saying we had no idea this is what happened to the AZDs or we didn't know this is you know learn more about their religion or culture so it was interesting in that respect and the reason for doing the research project was actually took it after showing it to that priest took it to the US Consulate and Bill and they were like this is great we should show you know we'll give you funding to take it to schools universities and I said before we do that we need to figure out what is the impact of this because it's such a new tool and so that's why we funded the the research project and what were the findings the findings were I mean the vast majority of participants nearly all of them were saying that you know that they learned more about the AZDs that they didn't know that much and learn more about what happened to the victims of sexual violence the need for justice for recognition the need to use such tools to counter extremism but unfortunately we didn't get the full funding to try and see what is the sustained change so I think after doing the VR a lot of people will say straight away oh my god that's terrible but what we would have loved to have seen is after six months what is the sustained change in behavior so there's a big conversation going on internationally about what technology has done to the truth and you know concerns about disinformation and here we have technology basically laying out the truth in an undeniable way tell me tell me what you think about all of the conversation around the use of technology and maybe other ways we could use technology to lift up the truth the valid um yeah you're speaking to someone who rarely uses social media so I don't know too much about um about how technology can be used in a way of countering disinformation but what we've done with our experience and what we've tried to do through the art and the exhibition is just to amplify the calls that are already existing so everything you listen to in the virtual reality is testimony that we have collected from the public domain and so these are the voices and stories of the survivors that we just want to amplify rather than you know having anything which could be construed as distorting the truth right and um was there any pushback that you would trigger people or that um you know when people say oh we didn't know was it that they didn't know or that they didn't really um want to accept that such a thing had happened I mean what there's so many layers to not knowing yeah it's a strange one I mean I think the VR experience had kind of surpassed my expectations um I think the beauty of using this technology is the ability to go to places that you wouldn't normally be able to access for security purposes or otherwise and have a level of empathy by feeling to be in the shoes of the person that's speaking and so again it kind of surpassed what we thought would happen um but yeah there were a number of considerations that we needed to take into account which is for instance the risk of retraumatization or triggering of people and so it was um a wonderful the number of human rights um lawyers activists and psychologists who came in to help us uh pro bono to help us kind of develop the tools so that we can make sure that we're not doing any harm right and you can't really let that pain stop you from putting things back together and uh creating a solution no no it's quite tricky no of course and um you know it's still a work in progress to see how we can continue to finesse and develop these tools and so um my previous career was in human rights and my last job was very privileged to work for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum but now I'm leaving that position well I've left that position to pursue um using virtual reality as a human rights advocacy tool going forward which I think um hopefully will be an impactful tool to use in our collective assets to advance human rights wonderful okay and so from Iraq to Sri Lanka our next panelist is uh uh Nelufa de Meur de Mel and she will be join us please come up to the stage uh she teaches at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka uh using applied theater to work with survivors in trauma healing she is a Fulbright scholar and was selected for a MacArthur Foundation grant uh very well respected for her work and uh Nelufa you you are a great believer in something called collaborative storytelling what do you mean by that and tell us a little bit about your work thank you uh thank you so much first uh to USIP for inviting me here uh and to this very timely set of conversations I've been very humbled by the expertise and commitment in the room um collaborative uh work so you're going to see a series of images uh from a project that led recently for the gcrf gender justice and security hub um and the the hub had six overarching themes or streams and one of it was called innovative methodologies and so the arts based project seemed to fit very nicely into the objectives of that stream um we worked with severely war affected Tamil women in Sri Lanka in eastern Sri Lanka uh and for those of you who are not familiar just to say that uh there was a 26 year war on in Sri Lanka fought between the Sri Lanka government security forces and the liberation tigers of Tamil elam over the foundation of a separate Tamil state and um so it had this ethnic nature to it uh which pitted singlies against the Tamils and the Muslims also got in you know caught up in this war uh because they were expelled from the north by the LTT within 48 hours and so on and so forth so um it is a very polarized society uh that I come from and where in fact there has there have been some um quasi implementation of various um sort of um demands for justice in terms of commissions and so on and so forth but not really a meaningful redress and these women who belong to very underserved communities uh they continue to live unrecognized uh no compensation no acknowledgement no reparation importantly uh as in many of such conflict zones they continue to live in places where there are sequential crises so during the war they this you know where I worked in the east of Sri Lanka it was very severely affected by the 2004 Asian tsunami and then more recently the two year intermittent covid lockdowns and which then precipitated the financial crash uh in Sri Lanka last year uh uh leading to its first ever sovereign debt default um which meant no no food uh shortage of fuel medicine and so on and so forth so in this context where recognition for what these women experience and how they live is very meager and I I I was you know uh SRSG pattern in her opening remarks on that first day you know talked about how recognition is transformative and um it's resonant with the kind of work that we wanted to do which is turn to collaborative art making and collaborative arts based methods uh to provide some form of recognition in this context of not being acknowledged at all uh towards speaking building stories um analyzing what is going on and uh enabling uh survivors to express what they feel um and also to bring their stories uh into performance uh it led to a video installation and ultimately this film that we are calling a video essay uh titled journey um the collaborative arts uh particularly performance arts like applied theater is uh thank you is um you know it's it's it's the best that I can get to as a researcher to a horizontal practice rather than a vertical one because it's a process and theater is very somatic so you it's very tactile um so from the time you start working with these uh communities uh you are there with them on the floor exercises warming up and I think that that allows for a certain kind of trust to be built uh that uh may not come as easy you know in other methodologies and um it's it's just an amazing kind of energy that comes I'm not trying to say that uh power really the power dynamic goes away all together it you know it's there in various ways it's diffused and it is there but nevertheless there is an attempt through that performative work uh at a collaborative story building um kind of exercise um theater is also very um useful I think in that way because it is um it's about transference it's about masking it's about art as artifice and that allows um survivors uh to talk about what happened to them in the ways they want to so some talk about it directly using the tools that we have shared with them through the theater others would um you know fall back into masking and that's fine um and so it allows that variety of um you know it offers a variety of strategies um and it allows the survivor to be much more agentive in picking and choosing how she wants to voice uh what happened to her and so uh for all of these reasons and and and I think also the symbolic nature of art helps in you know expressing these shared anxieties uh because it's not direct you can you can you can and all of us are cultural actors we all have uh resource and recourse to cultural tools of song dance ritual um myths poetry um and all of these can be used so I I I just found it a wonderful uh experience all around and uh I'd just like to end by saying I'm a trained literary scholar uh so I've been very interested in the arts for a very long time but you know they say a literary critic is a frustrated creative writer so I think that's true and so when um arts-based project you know an opportunity like this comes my way I jump at it thank you but your work is so impressive particularly as you describe the cascading uh dismantling of the conditions that you were involved in you know when you look at Maslow's hierarchy and think so you're going to come in and try to do reconciliation on a problem that existed before all of this um quite a challenge and yet you had faith you could do it and it did work yes I don't think we went in there saying reconciliation I think uh all of us who come from conflict zones have a very are quite wary of that word and what what is behind reconciliation I think we were just trying to give recognition and how uh we can you know tell these stories how the women want to tell these stories um so it's a cascading yes these cascading events and I think it was it's the the performance arts process allows us to listen because it's a it's long for instance this project went on from February 2022 to May 2023 not continuously but nevertheless for a year we were meeting uh we were meeting them they were meeting us but we also use certain kind of filters because uh our methodology was that we had a co-group of women who were very severely affected including CRS survivors and we used theater artists from the area itself who knew these people who came from the community who were also of the same ethnic community to act as facilitators so the strategy we used was called playback theater where you you work in fragments it's an advantage you you you come up with a story or a fragment of a story which then gets reinterpreted uh by the theater artist and that process was really allowed uh the women uh to gift their stories um in fact um you know on day two one of the women came and said now this is your story and it was it was an amazing kind of generosity there there was no possessiveness about that story um they you know once they understood that they had been listened to they were very happy for other people to take it on interpret it in performance so that it takes on a life of its own and I found that one of the most wonderful things that happened uh through this process you talked about two different approaches that were taken and as you describe how sort of individualized this was it makes perfect sense can you give us an example of somebody who chose to do it with a masking approach and maybe give us a little synopsis of just one little story right so um the masking approach was there was a there was a participant who um had lost a limb and uh in the playback uh the theater facilitator um just used you know uh many Tamil women wear anklets and they're very musical they're very much about Tamil femininity and she just put on a pair of anklets and just went and you know what's wonderful about performance is it says so much with so little uh so there was no direct storytelling of what had happened but just that um gesture gesture um told you everything you wanted to know about what it is to be disabled in war for a woman um so that happened um the direct method was where you know they would um they would actually describe so recalling memory the more quotidian of what happened every day um and uh but that is also very theatrical because when you when you recall memory um it's about you know what happened that day where you were what you were wearing uh what you ate how you moved and that's very much about performance too so i think both these uh roots can come together okay what was this like for the audience you've talked a lot about what it was like for people who participated but who was the audience and how did they respond to this so here is the issue for us in Sri Lanka there are lots of safeguarding issues involved here in fact the images you saw now had to be very deliberately picked not to show any faces because these women still live in highly militarized zones they're not safe and some of the stories they came up with are not even known to their families and so when um they told us well this is your story it's an immense gift but it's also tremendous responsibility and you're always caught between that gift that they give you that you can't tell yeah and so then as researchers and artists and activists where do you position yourself in between that gift and the not being able to tell and i think you know because we we come from societies which are very politically volatile you're constantly having to choose where to show it how to show it and so there's no one life in the outputs of this project you know it can take many avatars so the film has just come out and it was first shown to the women they were absolutely thrilled and they like the way we did it because it's not the straightforward talking heads documentary they really like that um and some of them wanted to own it they said oh i'm really sorry not to be in it because they were very proud of it but others understood why they were not in it um and so on and so forth okay wonderful nalu for thank you so much from theater to animation uh uh nayanika non-keji is an artist she will join us she's an animator who uses her craft to document the stories of survivors and it sounds like you know we're all sort of doing the same thing up here with different approaches uh she is a professor of political anthropology at Durham University in the uk she is a co-director of the Institute of Advanced Study and a fellow of the royal society of arts tell us about your work and i know we'll be seeing some of it um yeah should i yeah okay let's start it's going to get a small loop um hello yeah yes um thank you everyone i mean this is an um incredible panel to actually organize um an incredible um group of people um to bring together so thank you and gratefulness to everyone who's been part of this so inger um kathleen niggar anyone else um yeah i'm a i'm a political anthropologist um uh who has been um examining the public memories of wartime sexual violence um of the Bangladesh war of 1971 which uh came out in this uh in this book um the spectral wound um and what what what was um what was interesting uh for me in in in this book was um in terms of the research was um i i grew up in in india um and for me uh as an undergraduate student in the early 90s um uh when the Barbary Masjid came down you know kind of attacks the stories of sexual violence across communities was my kind of formative moment um uh and but at the same time we were reading you know feminist theories Rwanda Bosnia was going on and then i i i heard about the accounts in Bangladesh where actually um women who were raped during the Bangladesh war by Pakistani army were referred to as Birangunas um or a war heroine by the Bangladesh government as an attempt to reduce ostracization after in a post-conflict society and that till date has been unprecedented in all instances of wartime sexual violence to you know and and it had various kinds of ramifications you know uh uh messy and good uh and and as we said you know it's um the idea of recognition you'll you'll see a small clip in terms of where the recognition becomes an important part of that story that very fact that they were called war heroines which is you know it can't look a sound of it macabre you know you got raped you become a heroine but at the same time for a lot of women who did not want to come out and say that happened to them the state recognition was enormous as well but at the same time what was um and what is really interesting about this people often uh wonder that how come Bangladesh is a Muslim country they refer to women as war heroines and so because there's a whole and this is something we've been discussing about as well the ways in which um shame, honor, stigma, silence are bandied about in kind of homogenous ways actually doesn't tell us how stigma works or in what ways in which stigma works so so coming from these accounts what became important in in the book for me to find out is that the women um one of the many of the survivors I worked with would say they were coming out to the public and talking about what had happened to them and they would say uh this phrase called Malayitihash Charumithihash which means a lot of history a severe history and to this they're referring to the testimonial process what happened to them during the war yes but at the same time the very transgressive ways in which their uh uh testimonies were recorded became uh really uh uh a second sort of injurious process of uh they were like refusing to talk about what happened to them in 71 and in fact I never asked them what happened to you uh wall and all they wanted to talk about is how their testimonies were appropriated and were mis misused and with well intentioned human rights activists and feminists but it was just a pursuit of testimonies became a very very problematic way and this is what the book in a way shows so one of the things that often uh that in a way we show that there is no silence on wartime sexual violence in Bangladesh there's a public memory at the same time the the account of the war heroine that exists is that of a horrific narrative that she can only be thought of in a in a what I call a horrific sublime you know that either she has lost her mental capacity or she's without any kin relations and yet many of the women I worked with are living with the partners the husbands they were with when they were raped in 1971 this is over 50 years ago so what became as a result the central argument for to to portray is how to ensure that the process of testimony giving is not another set of transgressive process for survivors because then we are actually alienating them even further in the pursuit of testimonies so emerging from the from the findings of the book one of the things that came out um from uh from many of my collaborators in Bangladesh was uh oh like there was a set of guidelines that came up you know how to how to record testimonies but then many of my collaborators were like no I think I should do a you know graphic novel like and I'm like yeah that'll take me another two years down and and and then the two years went because it's not something which is um which is so the the next I hope this doesn't move okay so this is the graphic novel which many of you would have been seeing these flyers outside and there's a website with a graphic novel and an animation film is available to be accessed freely to be downloaded and accessed and this is the some of the hard copies that we made as part of the project but the the graphic novel in a way brings out these guidelines but at the same time based on an intergenerational story of uh between our grandmother uh young girl Labuni and her mother and what's happening and the mother is engaged in oral history project of of recording testimonies and what does Labuni find out and this has been really important because at the same in Bangladesh the many of the Birangonas are being given pensions by the government it's a it's a regular process which has been successful has been happening but um and at the same time the the the graphic novel novel was important because it brought out um the fact that um many of the researchers who were going and working in the Rohingya camps were actually transgressing these processes precisely and this is before the Murat Code comes out you know where the Murat Code kind of comes out from all the transgressions that are happening in the Rohingya camps in the search for testimonies and so the graphic novel has also fed into the Murat Code and one of the interesting things that that um so I am not the artist I'm the political anthropologist I'm the researcher but um a fantastic visual artist in Dhaka called Majmun Naharkaya so she um I did the story boards with her in collaboration with a large number of stakeholders from journalists to uh photographers to filmmakers to feminists and human rights activists in London as well as in Bangladesh so we had a whole series of workshops across two years doing this um and um what was uh and also obviously the survivors were very much part of it but the attempt for me in a way is to show that to think of the Birangona or the rape woman or the figure of the woman who has been raped as beyond a horrific figure right and my attempts are attempt in this is to bring out the socialities of violence through which women live on an everyday basis without it being a sensational horror story for us to be able to engage with it as an empathetic audience you know so so is to bring out and that I think is a really important political position precisely not to see whether a non-conflict conflict sexual violence as only to be identified through markers of horror so um the I'll leave with the next um can we can we keep this stopped yeah so um I'll leave this slide here as a way to kind of for you to identify and read if you can uh the two stories one is of Firdosya Priyapashnya sculptor and then the other is of Moritina Khatun who is a hospital cleaner and the how various ways their stories emerge and the socialities of violence through which they're living without it being a matter of horror and one thing that has been really important for us is um the use of archival material and photographs along with the comic version right so I could use a lot of materials which my Duke the publisher wouldn't didn't pass the art criteria of so I had a whole lot of photographs I've got already 47 photographs in the book but there was a whole lot of other 75 which didn't pass the side we use many of those photographs in the graphic novel but also importantly which we didn't think about the the formats of the graphic novel and the animation film actually has reached different kinds of people so it has been um as seen uh you know the Dennis McWakie Foundation used the graphic novel and showed it among uh colleagues in Congo as well as in Colombia and so and then it becomes accessible beyond so we have it in English and Bangla but the very um the the animation film is um you know it's not some Studio Ghibli or any kind of fancy Percipolis finesse um but um we added um some music and uh voiceovers and basically just move these slides to make the animation film because there was no money right but it generates a different kind of affect and feeling and precisely if you are not literate right so the graphic novel could be for 12 years and above or among um uh non-academic practitioners or it's being used for teaching it's being used by non-academic organizations but at the same time uh for 12 year olds to understand the history of the war uh and and about history of sexual violence but at the same time the animation film kind of reaches this you know kind of the movement of it reaches further audiences which the graphic novel the staticness of the graphic novel doesn't so the aesthetic of the format has been kind of an interesting thing which we didn't think about it when we made it you know um it it it generated became something and and something that the survivors actually feel like you know very very positively about some of the stories and we also have some fun pages in the graphic novel of hanging out not just only you know there are also lots of lovely times of you know the app one of my favorite pages page eight where the survivors are taking photograph of me in the mustard fields with a goat in my lap and that happened you know but those hanging out and those friendliness and and those moments of empathy and and fun and affection and belonging part of that story and belonging is part of the story not just only the testimonies and the stories itself well sounds like you've had quite a reach and is there any effort to train others and other communities that could have stories to be told similar stories are you trying to take this international at all because it's such a universal problem um I mean the the the message in the graphic novel is actually kind of goes beyond wartime conflict it's like the way in which if a survivor of rape is asked to give evidence in court you know it's very similar if you think about those ways of the the ideas of horror become science of evidence itself um I'm not an artist I am you know I did the storyboards and I it generates from the ethnography um the research I did um but um the the the artist Najma Narkeha is an amazing amazing artist but also what is really emerging in anthropology right now is this whole field of graphic ethnography um and there's a whole uh uh so my mind as well as um 50 other anthropologists there's a kind of series called illustrating anthropology series which is online available by the Royal Anthropological Institute did it so people are drawing and writing all their research a lot uh in two weeks time I'm back at the AAA which is the American Anthropological Association on a panel on graphic ethnography with a whole 10 of us speaking in a round table so it's it's a field which is really emerging and large number of younger scholars are actually writing through uh illustrations rather than text and I I find that really amazing I mean I'm not a drawer but I think it's it really provides a kind of orality whether of fear or orality of images you know um so the first page in the graphic novel um has um uh the the uh uh the the grandmother uh waking up for from a nightmare and uh and there are these uh four scenes from it which cross cuts different aspects of the story inside inside it but then the there's the sound of the boots and sound of the knocking on the door because the door became a real story of fear among many many uh you know the knock on the door who's at the door or you would have installations and exhibitions of just a door and people would actually see it and actually have a bit of panic attacks and but that door hand of the soldier in the next page transits into the hand of the grandchild coming back from school and that I think created that kind of sense of feeling I think that the arts can generate um but I also as I think I was talking to you the arts are not always liberatory or they can also be status co-ist and generate um you know the story of the dominated and not necessarily it's always a resistive force I think we need to be careful to give the arts all its kind of emancipatory potentials where it can actually be very much be uh kind of give a line which is being done anyway horizontal rather than vertical but also one last thing I wanted to say it's been really been fantastical to to you know kind of talk to many of my Pakistani colleagues uh in the in the last few days to talk through this work and the work that's happening in Pakistan among the younger generation and hopefully this can be translated into Urdu and Pakistan would be the way of reaching out uh in a place where people have remembered not to narrate about the rape. Well I just want to put a word in making these characters heroines and with animation I hope Mar-Vell is listening I think this is a wonderful approach and we really have to have now our next panelist Leslie needs to join us because so much of what we've been talking about is context and um cultural sensitivity uh Leslie is the founder of Artworks Project for Human Rights she is a human rights advocate uh featured documentary film director multimedia artist and architect her recent films include The Prosecutors and Thursday's Child. Leslie tell us a little bit about your work because it's so relevant. Thank you very much it's an honor to be here and it's always wonderful to be at USIP um when I was about 12 my father took me for one of our Sunday afternoon trips which was really always great I mean that could mean getting the car washed or going to run errands but this day it was to go see a photo exhibition um he's an anthropologist and he loved to he loves photography and the exhibition was was by a man named Eugene Smith and in it there was a beautiful photograph of two little children walking under some trees some of you may know this photo it's called Walk to Paradise Garden and it's very famous and I looked at this for a long time and I went and found my father and I said daddy you have to see this photograph it's so powerful he says it's a good picture but I want you to see something else so we went over and he showed me a picture of a young girl being bathed by her mother and it was set in Minimata and as some of you may know this was a town that was destroyed and there were many many terrible deaths and much disease because of the company that was polluting the waters and in collaboration with this young girl's mother Smith created this beautiful pieta the mother bathing her child and that photograph as explained to me had a couple of results Smith was beaten up very badly ultimately died from his wounds and and kind of the aftermath of that years years later but the pollution stopped the photograph was so powerful and this child and her mother had allowed the intimacy and the privacy of this very personal moment to go out into the world for decades and decades and the company was shut down the pollution ended and a precedent had been made that one photograph could change the world for many many people I will come back to this but years later the family decided that the daughter had done her service and that the photograph needed to be removed from the public in an era where the internet is for everywhere forever and everywhere this is not possible so I would ask us all to hold that in our minds when we think about collaborative work and now not to be extractive years later my son who next week turns 18 had just been born and I was looking at a photograph of a child in Darfur who had been killed because of his ethnicity this was a very small child who had had no experiences outside of his immediate family but someone came and killed him because of who he was of his essential core and who his community identified as and when I saw this photograph it was in the middle of the night and I was sleepy and holding my child and trying to figure out how to build a life with a baby my dinner conversation last night with some colleagues is teaching me that I'm still trying to figure that out and how do you work and and be a mother and lots of other things at the same time and I was so enraged this was in the context of Darfur in Sudan and I was so enraged that I thought perhaps there was something that we could do as a community to to end this this became a project called Darfur Darfur which evolved into projections on the Holocaust Museum and dozens and dozens of other buildings around the world that evolved into some projects like Congo women and at what cost and many other initiatives all that are photo based and which are done in collaboration with communities where grave human rights abuses were being found what we've done is do something that we call reverse engineering we are not making art for art's sake that is a beautiful and powerful thing it is not what I do in the context of political advocacy though and what we found is is a way to do this is to say what is the issue you're trying to address who is the constituency that you think has the lever to make change is this at the UN is this a national domestic community household action and then what is the piece of art or is there a piece of art that can be the trip lever to make that change do you need the security council to do something do you need your local municipal council to welcome you community members do you need consumers to stop purchasing something or allowing a company to pollute a river and through that really simple very basic methodology you can reach I believe personally all the people who hold the case to the kingdom it takes a very long time maybe it takes forever and that's fine because we've had conflict as long as we've had us so by trying to say where do we want to go and how can we reach people emotionally and sometimes that simply if I'd had my act together I would have had the photos up but sometimes that's actually showing one image from Congo to one senator who is the senior person on a committee or one member of parliament or one voter who then or one media member who then will show that information to an elected representative to just spark that dialogue and in terms of Darfur that meant things like divestment at the state and local and national level of countries around the world in terms of Congo it might mean pushing a committee to decide that they will support services in eastern Congo or they will change the way that our entire aid budget is moving or it can mean in a community in Germany explaining through local partners that those people who you have just burned out because you were afraid of them in fact are just like you by working with empathetic images that show that all of us are in this together I am always excited about all of this work I think that all of it together is something we can do I would like to close though with one small note in the process of doing this and in particularly a project that was inspired by the missing piece symposium that I had the pleasure to attend 10 years ago and in conversations with many people some of them were here but particularly my colleague and friend Kim T. Selinger I happen to hear her say that she was taking pictures of the desks of prosecutors and sometimes the prosecutors didn't have enough staples or paperclips that really stuck in my head so I very casually said oh it's no problem I have also made films I will make a film about people who don't have paperclips and then you can go on and do the research and support prosecution it is not that simple and many years later and many conversations with all kinds of people later we made a film called The Prosecutors and we followed national prosecution of conflict related sexual violence in Bosnia, Congo and Colombia after completing that film and some of you may have seen it after completing that film we began a series of roundtables and conversations and endless coffees with photographers and crew members to say did we do this ethically are we working in an extractive manner how is it that we made the decisions to do the interviews to work with power symmetry and asymmetry to bring these stories together and out into the world did we do it in a way we're proud of can we do better we went in with the best of intentions everyone does nobody's trying to do this in a terrible awful way but you are never the person on the other side of the camera I was doing interviews for the last couple of days here with an enormous number of people who are secure in their power and agency but at the end of the day when you ask the questions and they give the answers there's a moment there where we kind of sort this out is the camera running what did I say does my hair look all right I don't know you know so we ended up in collaboration with fcdo with Nadine and Kulbasia and dozens and dozens of people creating something called the media guidelines you can find it under covering crsv.org we hope it fits neatly with the marad code with other codes and guidelines but I would leave it with saying we have more to do on consent we have work to do on consent we have work to do on understanding what that means and what the dynamics are and I think we have to constantly question ourselves as we think about consent and and where where we can be helpful and where we can be harmful so that begs the question can there be a global solution or a global strategy given there are so many different contexts and cultures I will defer to others on this but my own vote is there's not going to be a perfect strategy but there can be an absolute sustained commitment to questioning that we need to remove our assumptions and I mean all of us whatever hat you wear whatever multitude of hats you wear as you come into this conversation we have to check again at the beginning of each dialogue are we doing this in a way that is supportive and non-extractive each time we do this and we learn over and question ourselves so I'm gonna open it up to everybody you're you talk about guidelines does everybody have their own set of guidelines I would imagine people are working within a framework that you've developed given the sensitive nature anyone want to speak to those um yeah I mean I think I would think in terms of the guidelines that we developed like generating from the research wouldn't be that different but I think there might be some ways of understanding where they converge or diverge for me I think the bottom line if you have to have a global template of how to record testimonies I think we need to ask survivors or emphasize to them what they want to talk about I think that is crucial to know what is important to them rather than what is important to prosecutors and researchers and governments or journalists or journalists filmmakers yeah but are there any cultures or conditions in which the telling of the story is not possible not a good idea and Sri Lanka comes to mind that you didn't want to have faces I mean it's a very tricky thing yes but that again there is there's variation I mean you just had two panelists from South Asia Bangladesh and Sri Lanka a very different story where in one country the state has taken it on as a story to say about nationalism and another country Sri Lanka where it's denied so and and where women too have to navigate their everyday circumstances and decide do they want to tell the story or not so it's really difficult to come up with a generalized template and I agree with Naanika that you know we we absolutely have to leave it to them as to what they want to narrate and it's controversial too because there was a a questioning in Sri Lanka in fact during our project about why is rape for instance a focus in CRSV when there's a garment of sexual violences that do take place and where women have worked for 20 20 odd years to try and even come to a place where they can cope with telling the story why go back to it but then as the researcher there if that is what they want to say we can't censor that we saw a lot of that in the Epstein case here in America people being afraid to tell the story so we're opening it up the topics are art truth reconciliation being an audience member being a content creator we have people with microphones we're going to lift the lights just a little bit and we'll take three questions at a time so that we can give our panelists a little time to prepare their answers but please just raise your hand and we'll come to you for any questions you may have we have one right over here and you will be our first of three and please identify who you are and where you come from hi everyone my name is Louisa I am from Washington University in St. Louis thank you all for your sharing of your projects and your work as I listened to everyone I just kept thinking about the intergenerational transmission of trauma and how it's embedded in bodies but manifests as behaviors and parenting and relationships between mother and child grandmother and grandchild etc so what is the role is there a role of your work in addressing some of these intergenerational harms whether addressing ameliorating disrupting thank you wonderful and we have another question did I see a hand up over here oh here we go a hand up the far left corner hello everyone thank you for this opportunity this is Nimad Ahmadi from Darfur Women Action Group my question is that in places like Darfur where sexual violence has been systematically committed for over 20 years we have seen sometimes like people like to tell their stories because they know that this will create awareness they also have expectation that they must maybe accountability or support and at some point some women we said like we are tired of telling our stories every time people come take our stories they go and we don't see them again so it's really hard like we want people to speak up and we want them to share their stories but also I'm just thinking like what we can do while people are waiting for justice or protection like I can assure you 99.9 percent of women survivors in Darfur have not received medical treatment or access to justice or any sort of support and so it's very hard to see so we wanted to know if you have any idea what we can do while people have not gotten any effective response to their plight thank you great question and this gentleman here oh two of you I'm just thinking I'm Mark Summers I'm a consultant worked on this field for quite a while I was just thinking with from the comment of on Darfur I have a new book out on Sierra Leone and one of the dynamics of Sierra Leone which I've been thinking about during this this fascinating session is is what's known as directed forgetting that when people that have gone through the war quite often in in Sierra Leone you don't talk about the war you have code names for the war itself and for the immense amount of sexual violence that took place as well as other acts of atrocity war crimes during the war there is this idea of direct directed forgetting that if you talk about it it comes back and so what you need is economic responses to help people move on in their life and it's not that you never talk about it but you would never do it publicly you would do it much more privately and intimately and I'm just wondering with regards to art how that dynamic takes place with the issue of directed forgetting because it really is a widespread cultural practice there thank you okay directed forgetting 200 years and there's an exhaustion on the part of the people telling stories because there are no results when those stories are told and intergenerational ramifications anyone up here want to take any of those on okay I'll actually if it's all right I'd like to address the the woman about the Darfur context briefly though I think this applies broadly I'll speak in my lane and then I'm going to make one comment a little bit outside of my lane I think that there is an enormous problem and I can only speak from the part of the media filmmakers journalists and so forth I'm not speaking in terms of those taking testimony for legal reasons or or other kinds of important documentation research humanitarian response I think that all too often well-meaning journalists and filmmakers who find themselves in context or with someone who is a survivor they do not clarify all the things that are out of control out of the control of that journalist of that filmmaker the the journalist or filmmaker cannot pay for these services they they cannot promise they will be published they cannot promise that those those images or those stories will make the desired change they can't control where they go and even with good intentions too often people are so anxious to get what they feel is a story that the world needs to hear or even worse to give voice to the voiceless one of just the most unbelievably bullshit statements you can make they they in a rush to do this do not explain fully what this information exchange is about and time and time again and I'm going to come back to meetings that Colbasia and Nadine and I had and many other survivors this lack of shared information and clarity does great harm and damage over time to the survivor community and also to all survivor communities so I apologize and I think that we have to work very hard to do that I would also just as an associated piece say that those working in transitional justice and other types of justice mechanisms to understand what exactly is wanted and if formal justice or traditional justice is going to take a very long time or maybe never happen are we giving testimony around things or are we talking about the response that can be done more quickly and are we putting those priorities I am not a lawyer and this is right out of my lane here as many of you know but I hope that that is in some kind of response and hopefully our community can do better and is doing better okay anybody on intergenerational ramifications of sexual violence anyone addressing that I can talk to it in terms of so the graphic novel precisely is kind of about that intergenerational storytelling of vicarious memories let's say you know one and how one gets to know about those stories I mean I guess it depends what kind of intergenerational stories are being narrated on and what the what happened to the earlier generation so it is something that could come up if once family has gone through it or the role of objects become I think really important in that passing off so I would have students in my classes talking about something their grandfather left in a way in which that becomes something that stands in for that violent event and if I could respond to the gentleman at the end in terms of the directed forgetting I've written about ideas of remembering to forget or remembering what not to narrate in the case of Pakistan but also what was became really important for me in my research is I never asked the women what happened to you because I realized what had happened before in terms of those testimonial cultures but what became important is a role of fragments so we would be together and and one of the survivors would say there was a storm coming we are standing at the edge of a field and she would say even on that day I was in the storm like this and would walk away so women would often talk in fragments rather than linear narrative and I think that is really important to highlight in terms of bringing out the way in which they themselves live with various objects which still remind them of things of that day even if they want to forget about it and no one may know that that's why the okay so directed forgetting I don't know I'm thinking of the Irish a little denial the troubles do you want to say anything about that even identifying what happened in Ireland as the euphemism of the troubles I grew up with that well except that's partly because you grew up with that in English the Irish word for bereavement is tribloid and so when we speak about the troubles we speak about bereavements so it's got a great weight to it in that way yeah and that that is part of the way within which um it's the chosen forgetting of the powerful to imagine that the English imagination about what's being called is the full story and so for me it is to say well the indigenous language actually carries the weight of it and it's the chosen forgetting of the powerful um through the medium of the English language which was imposed through colonization that that is a way of diminishing the way that we speak about the words that we have the Irish corner Brian you you you want to add something I can see it in your eyes um no just a comment to kind of coming back it's nothing intelligent I guess it's more from a place of depression um we we um called the the exhibition nobody's listening because this is a refrain whilst we're doing the pre-production to the VR and the exhibition a refrain we heard from the community over and over again in every conversation this idea of feeling that they're being abandoned and nobody's caring for them um and yet you know a lot of the Yazidi activists I've had the pleasure of working with are you know absolutely phenomenal human rights champions after suffering such horrific atrocities um and I was it was in Iraq in August for the ninth anniversary of the genocide and it's just quite depressing to see the level of fatigue that they're now facing uh of continuing to champion and call for action and yet falling on deaf ears so again it's it's not a very intelligent comment because I have nothing really to add to that but I think it's just the importance of the work that we all have to do and and the role of art as well of documenting what happened so that again finding new ways that that they don't need to keep championing or talking about what happened to them and finding new ways to try and convey the message of what needs to happen well you know it was 20 years ago that the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 which did have a very big piece of it that was on sexual violence um took hold we hoped and is there are there actions that can be taken when I heard you talking about we decide the audience we come up with the tool and we deploy the arts like the military might has anyone deployed some arts on on the UN with you know I know I started a peace prize with Marsha Carlucci here at the USIP pegged to uh 1325 because every year now we give a peace building prize to a woman just to remind people about those commitments I think you need to go after them that needs to be your next audience what would you think of that um well certainly certainly screenings and exhibitions and and films and all of those things with the Security Council have been a very important thing to do um SRSG hosted along with Karim Khan now the OTP lead um you know a screening of the prosecutors um and we've done many installations there and I truly believe that people learn in different ways so no matter what your role in the world it may be that your visual or your tactile or your aural or whatever it is so we need to reach people with stories in a multitude of ways and one of them will stick um I just if I could I wanted to say one more thing about this um I also think that that if you consider yourself an art maker or a creative or if you are are making things and if they are about yourself completely and totally I think you are asking yourself where your boundaries are but if they are in any way shape or form about someone else or another story that was not your own and if we as a society do not want to limit ourselves to memoir and I think that would be sad if we could never tell anything about anybody else I think that one of the things that that we asked in in the guidelines that we did is does this story need to be told if you are trying and I'll come back to this film if you're trying to make a film about justice in conflict weighted sexual violence I don't believe you needed to make a film about the victim testimony of this I think you could make a film which we did about the prosecution of it and you can have a great deal of input from legal victim survivor witnesses advocates people who hold at least four hats if not many many more and their advice but I don't understand why we constantly have to ask someone to tell their story over and over if what we're doing is trying to end the issue so you started with a story about you right and I'm a big believer in story and I think that's probably I don't think there's any other motive when people do focus on the story and and I think that it's wonderful in the case of Ryan because I think that's sort of side steps what you're worried about which is the appropriation and perhaps depiction of a story in a context that that a survivor wouldn't feel comfortable with or would actually be a detriment to the survivor you know you have managed to come up with this great application of technology to go right to that empathy and yet you know I don't think you have the concern that many artists have in telling the story of survivors because of the way you do it am I wrong that's very kind of you I should use as advertising no it's there's there's still a number of challenges that we still face and I think it's the same kind of ethical questions that we also face that Leslie mentioned about are we extracting is this exploitative but I think that's why it was so important to have worked with the community with yasta every step of the way and discussing and ensuring that we are you know doing justice to their story and that they're happy with what we're trying to do as well and you also if you go through the exhibition you might also check out the internet where they show what happened when you brought this out to the field and you had people who had been survivors of sexual violence and they're they told their stories in the context of having just been through this experience I mean it was there were so many levels to it kind of sussing out truth or you know whatever version of the truth you know I mean it's just a tricky thing the truth I remember when I was little I went to the Library of Congress and there were all these quotes about truth and I thought boy they're making a big deal about truth we all know what truth is but some seems the more we know the less we know so we're going to wrap it up here I want to thank everybody for coming and we're going to impose on Padre to to recite us out there's so much about power that we've been talking about and I don't know any conflict that where power is equally shared power is always an imbalanced thing so here's a set of postcards from different points of view about power to the center from the edge this circle is marked out by the dredges of your justice and at these edge place rots we eat the cross of hope must this circle never end please can we make a new shape shaped a bit like you and shaped like me shaped like how we think that things might be if things were not the way they've been and I know I know that's a dreamers dream but what if dreams like nightmares could be real to the center from the edge we're still here if you drown out all our voices you will not drown out your fear we're still here