 So welcome, everyone, to this last panel of the day. This one is also in the previous panel, we were hearing a lot about the challenges and risks of accessing evidence and gathering evidence. And in this one, we're looking more at what you do with it when you've got it and what it is and what it can tell you. So the panel is Case Studies in Evidence, Archival, Textual, Visual, Testimonial. My name is Rachel Kerr. I'm a professor of War and Society in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. And also co-chair along with James Gao, the War Crimes Research Group here at King's. So I'm really pleased to introduce our two speakers. We have more time available to us in this panel. Unfortunately, our other speaker, Maria, Gollick couldn't join us, which is a real pity because I was looking forward to hearing about her paper, which sounds really interesting. But the upside is that we have longer to spend with Helen and David on there to very interesting papers as well. So I'm looking forward to hearing from them and please feel free to take a little bit more than the allotted 15 minutes if you need it, but be good to finish up and enough time to allow some time for questions and discussion. And particularly if we want to reflect a bit about the connections with other panels as well. So if I can just introduce you both briefly, and then we will go in the order that's on the program. So first up, we have Dr. Helen Mutier, who is at the University, and he's put my glasses on, lead by de Beauceil, sorry about my accent, which is terrible. And we'll be talking to us about Gulf War memoirs, thoughts and representations of war through visual archives, the role, position and responsibility of the artist researcher. And then we will hear from David Folk, who is a PhD candidate at Oil College at the University of Oxford, talking about memorializing the French resistance, resist, record, reassess, alias, alla. So over to you Helen to kick us off, if you've got some slides to load up. So thank you, Hachel, thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here today with you and to have this great opportunity to share my work and my research about the first Gulf War. So yeah, to introduce myself in few words, I'm a French visual artist and researcher. I made a PhD between the Free University of Brussels in the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Science and at the same time in the Academy of Fine Arts. So it was a PhD in research and creation. So it was really interesting because it was the opportunity for me to both have the experience of my artistic research and at the same time to develop an academic research. So today I will start to present in the first time the beginning of this research and the origin of my thought about the first Gulf War of 1991 and then in a second time, I will present some of my artistic work based on the analysis of military archives from this conflict. So all this very long research started in 2009 when I discovered in my family course a lot of military archives from the first Gulf War and composed of photographs, newspaper and video. And these documents belongs to my father who was a soldier in the French Army and he was in the Gulf during the conflict and his work was to prepare the mission of the French Army. So about this archives, my interest was mainly focused on photography and I was at the beginning extremely struck by the historical signification of these documents. And at the same time, completely lost because I just didn't, I just cannot understand what I have under my eyes. It was really like a shock when I discovered this photograph. And I realized that it was really important to decipher and analyze this photograph but I was totally unable to do it and I really didn't understand what they represented. So it was something new for me. It was a new kind of images. I have never seen something like that before. So one of the important things to know about this project it's at the link with these documents. It was at the beginning a link very intimate, very personal and very private. And at the same time, it was very far away from me because I had to understand it before incorporate the images in my own approach and my own artistic work. And at this moment, I asked to my father to help me to understand these photographs. And because it was one of the most important things for me to create this link between the origin of the archives and my own research. So it's also important for me to precise that this research was not a thought and about the legal dimension of the military document and the classified defense that it was a research about this archive status. So I've based all my work and all my research and my artistic work considering the military archives as a tool to propose a new approach to understand contemporary conflict through this approach between research and creation. And then in a second time inserted in a contemporary art context. So across this research, my intention was to find a way to document the world. And I consider that documenting the works for military archives was one of this way. And the first question when I started this research, I asked to myself, what are these photographs? What type of documents do I have to deal with? Because originally these photographs are only our real reconnaissance images taken by fighter planes to show and to testify that the missions carried out by the army during the conflict was down. So this is some pictures taken in a military context by military devices and then analyzed by soldiers and produced only for the military in order to provide a visual proof that the target has indeed been a shift. So for example, this picture we can see a soldier who is analyzing some pictures taken by drones. And we can also note that the pictures in black and white are mostly in black and white. The size is mostly a square. And at the first glance, it's very difficult to understand the meaning without any expertise in the analysis of this type of images. So at this point, I've drawn a parallel between this photographic archives and my own artistic research and I established two observations. First, I have to consider the war in connection with my own gaze and it will be possible to propose another look on war and on conflict situation and very far from the appreciate traditionally associated with conflict. And I describe this look. It was the main concept of my thesis research. It's a look, I called it a north-central look like this subjective look. And I have to find a way to go beyond this fascination and this aesthetic enjoyment I felt by discovering these photographs in order to propose a kind of visual alternative. And it is accordingly that this shift in the gaze may be understood. And then secondly, I noticed that the images produced during the Gulf War will not allow me to understand the conflict because this new images in the field of war representation were new and they provoked a rupture in the representation of the war. And one of the only things we have retained from this conflict was precisely the lack of the representation. And for example, during my research, sometimes I ask from two people around me, gives it any memories of this conflict and whatever the memories and they often answer me, we didn't understand what was happening because we didn't see anything of this conflict. For example, to illustrate this world, you can see here it's an infrared image of a laser-guiding ground-to-hermicyle published in the Figaro magazine, the 26th of January in 1991. And the caption of this picture is, this is a scalpel precision, but what was shot exactly? So this kind of words and expressions used to describe this conflict were essential, very, very present for my work and they weren't necessary because it steer me to question the way in which a conflict is given to see today in the contemporary conflict and the condition of production of the war images as well as in the second time, this condition, the condition of the visibility. And thinking about the condition of visibility, it's also a challenge for the new form of visual narrative, which result from the production of this images at the crossroads of an artistic and a scientific knowledge. So this dialogue, this dialectical relationship between research and creation prove that the implication of these new methodologies is multiple today. The collection of scientific data by artists, as well as the new ways of seeking generated by this hybridization, a part of positions that promote and control between art, humanities, social or political sciences. And it was an important point during all my thesis research because I realized that with my colleagues in political sciences in international relations, we have sometimes a lot of academic references in common. So I will now present three projects I have developed through this military archives. So you can see a view of my thesis exhibition. It was at the end of the year 2020 and I thought and conceived it this exhibition at the culmination of my research about the archives of the Gulf War and thus it brings together all the projects I had carried out between 2010 and 2019 around these documents. So I really worked like a big investigation and sometimes very close to a journalistic approach and it led me to process and use this archives as a real tool of research. And I observe this image a lot and sometimes for a very long time, I manipulated them, I reproduced them, I put them aside and came back to them several months or sometimes several years later because it was a research I conducted for more than 10 years. And little by little, a formal rigor appeared like an obviousness and I decided to only work with the square size to keep the first version format of the archives. So here you can see in the showcase some of these archives I was work with. So for this project, entitled before and after I worked and implemented a particular military observation procedure such as before and after one, which make it possible to observe the damage caused on the same place, but at two different time on specific territories which was bombed. So for example here, I reuse exactly the same process using Google Earth software and images produced in Google Earth. So from five geographical coordinates of locations that were born during the Gulf War, one in Iraq and four in Kuwait, I collect and I took all the images that the software has on this site location and use it to do a big installation of all this archive produced by satellites of Google. Here we can see a detail of the installation. So by establishing this precise and regular process, I wanted to situate and remain my work with the continuity of the standardization quasi-industrial operating processes. So the image is here inserted in a serial and continuous mode of production and the series can continue and evolve all the time on and according to the technologies advances of Google Earth and the new images which are produced by the satellites. So here I stopped the project in 2016, but I could continue the series. So as a second project, I would like to present to you it's a project called Entitle ETA and it's a project composed of a series of 26 photographs that I produced on spectroscopic glass plate. At this time, when I developed this project, I was working, it was like a collaboration during my PhD with a Royal Observatory of Belgium so I have access to some kind of particular documents and material to works. And for example, here the spectroscopic glass plates are specific plates originally used to photograph the sky. So I made pictures transferred of my personal archives on this blank glass plates, adapting the photographic development process by accomplishing everything by hand and using emulsions applied on the glass. So since the photography and the glass and made it together, it's like combined the influence of astronomy science and war perceptions to create a link between the appearance of a new images and its own disappearance at the same time. And so after all this long project and especially after my thesis, I thought that my work was done with golf work. I thought that it was behind me and that I cannot do anything else about this conflict. But finally, one year ago, I decided to start a new work about these subjects, but a new field work by going in the golf to produce my own pictures as a photographer and to work with this time with public archives and not with personal archives. So I have the opportunity to go in Saudi Arabia in the March and April of this year in the context of an artistic residency program in Jeddah. So this new project, so I started this year, it's entitled Here and There. So I developed, I started to develop the project during the arts residency called the Albalad Residency Program. So it's a new long-term project. I would like to develop it for two or three years. And it's a project that combines a photographic approach and the production of a documentary of creation in the West and in the Gulf region between France, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq to cross the way with one of the golf courses This research is based on the history of the 1991 conflict but follows the temporal and geographical unfolding of the fact to propose to take a sociological look at the work in the light of the technologies traditionally used in the military field. So as you can see on the slide, this is some example of photographs I took during the residency. So I chosen to produce my photograph by using the black and white infrared technology because it was a photographic technical who was originally using by the army. And it was especially used by the army during the First World War to improve aerial shots on glass plates for making some landscape mappings. So for example, here you can see the Red Sea just in the area of the city of Jeddah. And here it's a specific place, it's a specific area in the city of Jeddah and we call it Halis Khan building. And the thing that was very interesting for me is that it's an area, it's a place where there is 32 buildings and it was a place where some refugees were slept during the war. So during the intention of this project is to go to specific places that play a specific role during this conflict. So during my sixth week in Saudi Arabia, I went to, I stay in Jeddah and I also went to, so you have these pictures of a normal picture of the Halis Khan building and then this is a picture in infrared photography. And I also went to Yom Bu, to Yom Bu Arbor because a part of the French army came in Saudi Arabia in 19 by the Arbor of Yom Bu. And so I was in the area to take my pictures and to start also the scooting for my documentary. So here there is a, this is a part of Yom Bu and this awesome screenshot for video rush for the documentary I am currently developing. And on this last slide, you can see an archives of the French army taken in 90 when the French army arrived at Yom Bu in the harbor of Yom Bu. And the soldiers stay there for a few days before going in the desert to join some strategic and tactical places in the desert. So for example, in the military city of King Khalid are close to the border with Iraq and the Kuwait. So this project is still in progress. This is really, really, really the beginning but the next step is to go back to Saudi Arabia and to continue later in Kuwait. And I arrived to once and for all finish these pictures and this documentation about these conflicts. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you Helene. That's absolutely fascinating and really great to see some of the work that you've been producing. I think we're going now from images to text and memoir. So David, over to you to present yours. I think you have a PowerPoint as well, don't you? Yes, yes I do. So I'll just get that set up. Okay, so can everybody see that? Yeah, do you want to just hit the slideshow button so that it shows, yeah, grab, that's it. Okay, good. All right, well, thank you very much. So today I'm going to be talking to you a bit about a man whose name is Daniel Cordier and I've entitled this presentation, Resist, Record, Reassess, Alias Alan. Okay, so this is an introduction that was given by a man who was known as Alans Sabari. He was in Francois Mitterrand's government and I'll just read it out for you. He arrived in England on the 25th of June, 1940, guiding 14 volunteers. In July, 1942, he was parachuted into France. He created and led Jean Moulin's secretariat in Lyon and in Paris until March, 1944. Holds Moulin's archives. In the archives of the BCRA, he selected the documents for the White Book on the BCRA, which he wrote in collaboration with Stefan and VCR Hessell. In the past five years, you have prepared a work on Jean Moulin's mission. My dear companion, I give you the floor. So this is an introduction to Daniel Cordier was given by Alans Sabari, the education minister in Francois Mitterrand's government, and also a former resister. And the speech was made at the Sorbonne on the 9th of June, 1983. This event sought to showcase the growing historiography of French resistance during the Second World War. Having arrived in England on the 25th of June, 1980, Cordier heard that Charles de Gaulle had spoken on the BBC airways. De Gaulle's call at the 18th of June was an appeal for like-minded French people to rally to his side. After joining the Free French forces, Cordier volunteered for Colonel Passy's second bureau, which served as the Free French information services. In France, Cordier was seconded to Jean Moulin, former prefect of Urges-Héloir, and since January of 1942, he had been de Gaulle's political representative in the country. As Sabari had underlined, Cordier led the secretariat, which was Moulin's administrative office. Over the following year, Cordier handled over 300 million francs, largely of which were largely destined for the movements, combat, liberation suite, and franc-terror, those were groups within the French resistance. Following Jean Moulin's arrest in Caliure on the 21st of June, 1943, Cordier remained in Paris to organise the administration for his successor, Claude Bouchinet-Cereaule. However, the arrest of Cereaule's new team had forced Cordier to leave France for Spain, where he was interned at the Miranda camp on the 8th of April, 1944. With Paris liberated alongside Stefan and VCR Hessell, the trio did indeed write the white book of the BCRA, which was a history of the organisation's operations and their organisation. Afterwards, Cordier turned towards the art world having become passionate about modern art through his conversations with Moulin. Cordier opened a gallery in Paris in 1958 and subsequently went on to open to more in Frankfurt and in New York. Nonetheless, the growing commercialisation of the global art market led Cordier to turn his back on the industry in the early 1960s. In 1977, however, Cordier was invited to appear on a television programme where he was to talk about the life of Jean Moulin. He took debate ensued with Henri Frené, who was the leader of one of the resistance groups, Comba, and they were the largest of the French resistance movement. And Frené was defending the recently published crit... However, Cordier only answered the accusations that Frené was making very weakly, and he relied on constant appeals to previously unseen documents that he held in his possession. So in order to correct this weakness, he had to become a historian once again. Visiting archive, Cordier and his team of researchers produced two volumes on Moulin's life before the war and a synthesis of his wartime missions. Cordier received a lot of acclaim for his biography of Moulin, but it was his war memoirs that were written in the style of a diary, which allowed him mostly to reflect upon his own life story. He had been a participant, he'd become a historian, and he was now offered the chance to give multiple re-appraisals of his own wartime service. His book, Alias Caracola, was turned into a 2013 telefilm, and his memoirs from the period 1943 to 1946 were posthumously published last year in 2021, reflecting upon his wartime role. Few in France were in a position to say that they had played a leading part in French resistance activity, but even fewer can have been said to have re-analyzed the historical documents that they themselves had written. Okay, so returning to Cordier's time in the resistance, his mission to enter France began on the 26th of July, 1942. Originally, he had been expected to serve as the wireless transmission officer for the Bureau d'Information et de presse, Bayipay, the Bureau of Information and the Press. However, he was instead introduced to Jean Moulin. The next day, Moulin created his secretariat, putting Cordier at its head. The mission's objectives were to unite the three southern movements that I referred to earlier, by convincing them of general support, both militarily and monetarily. Moulin intended to do this by creating a common administrative framework, wherein the missions, the movements required, but did not have the financial and organizational means to implement, which they required, but they didn't have the financial and organizational means to implement. Cordier began his secretarial tasks by recruiting for the mission REGS. REGS was the codename for Moulin's mission. His first recruit was an Alsatian refugee called Lordebold and who served as the mission's typist. Cordier's other tasks included encrypting and decrypting messages that were destined for London for keeping meetings with other groups, holding on to the mission's money, and also distributing it via the use of clandestine liaisons. However, in response to the growing imperative that was coming from De Gaulle's forces over in Algiers, in order to form a union between those diverse groups in France, Moulin traveled to Paris with more and more regularity. With the mission of establishing the National Resistance Council approaching its fruition at the end of 1943, where all of the major groups in the southern zone coalesced alongside some of the political parties from the northern zone. Cordier was himself sent up to the capital in order to create another secretariat. However, Moulin was arrested in June at the house that I've got showing on the PowerPoint. It's in one of the outskirts of Lyon, Calduir. And this heralded a period of great instability for Cordier unsurprisingly, and he fled at that point to Spain. He arrived back in Britain and was therefore reintegrated into the Gaullist secret services, the BCRA in May of 1944. Okay, now onto the second part of the talk, which are called record, before the Cordier phenomena. The Cordier phenomenon is Julian Jackson's of Queen Mary University of London. It's his term to reflect Cordier's role as a, and I quote, historical actor, a historian and a witness. He builds on Laurent Duzou from a historian from Lyon and what he referred to as the, and I quote, Cordier moment that was published the previous year and which argues that the 1983 conference that Cordier held at the Sorbonne and said that it was a pivotal moment for the historiography of resistance in France. Before Cordier, many texts produced on the resistance had relied on interviews, oral history interviews with participants. However, due to the unrivaled access to written sources that Cordier held, he attempted to write the history of Mulan's life principally from the use of this archival evidence. As one of Cordier's first attempts at writing history, it is important to look a bit more into the writing of the livre blanc, that is what I believe. So in the spirit of post-liberation Paris, the language employed in the the white book is highly laudatory of the efforts of resistance forces both inside and outside of France. For instance, there is, there are many mentions of the words Patriots, patriots and on seven occasions and the suggestion that the cross of Lorraine that you've been able to see behind in the PowerPoint and that the cross of Lorraine is a symbol of French unity. There's also a tendency to show the author's proximity to the efforts in France. So what I've just put up here is the word clouds that show the livre blanc, all of the, all of the texts that went into the livre blanc, I've put it into word cloud format using those words that are over five characters in length. And then I've put it against another word cloud that was created from using American sources but also talking about resistance activity. So there is a tendency for the authors of livre blanc to show their proximity to the underground efforts that were taking place in France. Their tone is quite unlike those that were adopted in the official histories which favor the separation of authors from the events in question. This tendency has been amplified when the livre blanc is compared to the document on the organization of activities in the French resistance units which were undertaken by the historical section of the TUSA, ETO USA, the US Army. Throughout the livre blanc, the British are recognized as having helped French resistance efforts, but they also, it's made clear that they also remained reticent when giving their full support to General de Gaulle. And this has been clarified by other documents that were found in the National Archives. What Jackson refers to as fetishization of documents was a direct consequence, I believe, of having written the livre blanc. Cordier admitted that many of the documents that he had held himself belonged in the BCRA's archives. However, his successor in the post back in 1944 when he decided to turn his back on the military and go into private life. So his successor, Guy de Broglie, had shut up a lot of these documents into boxes and send them to Cordier's personal home after he had left his job with the services, hence why Cordier had his own separate archives relating to the BCRA. With those documents, he was even able to bargain with them, promising Pierre César, the then head of the modern history at the Archive Nationale, that he would return them and quid pro quo. Cordier would receive privileged access to other files concerning Moulin that were kept within the Archive Nationale. So this all goes to show the unique nature of the work that was able to be done by Cordier. Would the Cordier phenomenon have existed had it not been for the livre blanc, that was what I was asking myself. So now for the third part, which are called reassess among the few. So arguably, it may well have done. Cordier remained an important secondary figure in the panoply of resistance leaders and wartime friends. His own story, which only appeared a few times in his own works, when he was writing about Jean Moulin, was viewed as being sufficiently important so as to lead one of the French historians on the resistance Jean-Pierre Azema to suggest that Cordier should write his own memoirs, which ultimately led to Alias Cracula. And that marked a further transformation in Cordier's cultural role, where he began as a protagonist before becoming a historian and then capping it off by writing his own memoirs. So in his final years, Cordier saw his role as changing from defending Moulin's honour, as he previously had done against Henri Frené in that 1977 television appearance. And he saw it turning towards keeping alive the memory of those who had resisted against the Nazi occupation. So throughout the livre blanc, its authors referred to la resistance, the resistance. This usage of the capitalisation on the R and the singular form of the noun demonstrate that the author's thoughts on the subject. Effectively, it semantically disregards other resistance efforts that were taking place in France, but outside of the Gaulle list organisational framework, including those that were run by, that were known as the Bookmaster missions, those were missions that were run purely by the British Secret Services, the SOE, as opposed to those that were taking place in conjunction with the BCRA, and those were led by the Free French as well as SOE. However, by the time of writing of Alias Caracola, so in 2009, Cordier had by his own admission begun to recognise the plurality of resistance activities. The writing style of Alias Caracola is, as I've said earlier, highly, highly different to the approach that he took for his biography of Jean Moulin. As these had been received widespread praise, that helped to provide legitimacy for Cordier's own later memoirs. And instead, Cordier's story unwinds through the form of a daily journal with a lot of direct dialogue within it. However, for Cordier, the material culture and things that he kept, such as his paybook, for instance, as you can see on the screen, it's all of this underlined veracity of his own literary story. So the interviews that I conducted with Mr. Cordier were intended to record his own memories about the financing in particular of French resistance, as he was such a fundamental part in the expedition. And secondly, to find out more about his own everyday experience in occupied France. The only previous records on resistance financing were written by the main participants in London, people like Pierre Denis, the head of the Free French financial services, or those who were in post during the Algerian period. So after 1943, when de Gaulle had left London and taken up his place in Algiers, so people like André Pastarvigny, or it came from the organization of financing from inside France in 1944. So those who had also been dispatched, but at a later point than Moulin and Cordier had. So people like François Blanc-Layne. So at times, Cordier spoke very poignantly, most notably about his post-war relationship with Suzette or Suzanne Olivier, where he explained that he bitterly regretted the pain that he caused her when he told them, he told her and some of the other members of his secretariat, that he would no longer see them after the war, that he was trying to make a clean break with everything that had come before the war. Cordier's hostile feelings for Petitin and the Nazis had crystallized into a continued anti-pathy. And relating to de Gaulle, Cordier clearly respected his wartime leader, but in the years after the war, their paths had diverged politically, and Cordier had been a founding member of what was known as the Club Jean Moulin. So alongside Stefan Hessell, with whom he'd written the livre blanc, Cordier and another friend set up a group where there was a movement of resistance born out of a refusal of a certain idea of the Republic. They were contestatory. They did not like what de Gaulle represented and were worried that by exploiting rebellion in Algeria, that de Gaulle was going to lead France towards fascism. So he clearly had gone from being a very, very fervent supporter of de Gaulle to in post-war years being one of his most fervent opponents. Okay, so in conclusion, Cordier was one of the first members of the French external resistance coming over to London in June 1940. He was sent back into France to serve as a wireless operator before being seconded to Jean Moulin to serve as his secretary for the mission. Cordier's financial work was vital for the survival of French resistance efforts during the difficult period of 1942 and 1943. Towards the end of the war and following his escape from France, Cordier co-authored the official history of the ECRA, the Bureau de Saint-Trois-de-France de l'Action. After a brief career in the art trade, he began to write his former boss's biography, but later in life having previously relied on written reports and data to perform his work, Cordier radically altered his approach for his own biography. Jackson's Cordier phenomena, or reflecting on Daniel Cordier, a protagonist, historian and memorialist, all stems from Cordier's participation in the writing of the livre blanc and the financial aspects of his wartime work. Thank you very much for listening everybody. Thank you very much, David. Thank you, that's really interesting, very detailed account of the sort of processes of writing memoirs and writing history in the life of this one person. I just wonder why we gather in a couple of questions. I was just going to draw a couple of more general questions that arise from both of your papers. The panel, just at the beginning, went from challenges and risks of getting to the evidence and gathering the evidence to this question of what we do with it and what is done with it. I think it's this issue around purpose, the purpose of what you're doing with it and the audience for it that is really interesting and sort of ties together perhaps your two papers. So you're talking about very different formats of evidence and different uses of it. Both sort of images and texts, if you like, and archives and how that is drawn out. But both of you are talking about interpretation and both of you are talking about the use of interpretive tools, so whether interpreting material to write histories or to write memoirs or interpreting it to create artwork. And so you're sort of taking, if you like, raw data and then doing something with it. So this sort of takes about this question of what the evidence is for and I think in this sense maybe we make a distinction between the different types of evidence and different purposes and the sort of line between historical, so historical evidence, using evidence to indicate something or to support something and using evidence in a legal context to prove something. I think those things are quite different and that sort of relates back to the earlier discussions about testimony and historical narrative. But I wonder, in this case, what are these types of evidence being used to do? What are they doing? First of all, what can they do? What can memoirs do? What can artwork do that other forms of evidence might not be able to? Is there something different in its ability to connect and the stories that it can tell? Helene raised a question in her paper of truce and I think that's a really interesting one to ponder about what kind of truce and whose truce is found using evidence and certainly interpreting evidence and the differences between establishing, using evidence to establish facts, using evidence to take meaning. And I think in both cases, the interpretation of the evidence and the sort of reworking of it and rewriting it go to raise some questions about where the tensions are and where there was, Helene calls it a confrontation between those two things. And my question really for both of you is can evidence then provide both? Are both of your accounts, the art, whether you produce Helene and the memoirs and the memoirs an accounting of facts or are they an accounting of meaning or is it both? And then also to think about the audience for both of those things, I think in both of your papers, the audience is quite important as to who it is that is being affected by either the memoirs, the biographies and the interpretations of history or by the artwork. So, David, in your case, I had a particular question about the purpose for which Cordier is writing. So, you talk about the encounter that he had that made him go back and have another look, so we examine the archives and represent history and then it becomes increasingly his story rather than Mulan's story. And I wonder in that sense whether you have any indication of what, you know, beyond that kind of initial defence, what is it that motivates that work and what audience is seeking to reach in doing that? And then Helene, thanks again for showing us a bit of your work and I think one of the things that comes across is the compelling nature of the images that you present, the artwork that you present, that it makes you want to look at it and engage with it. And I wonder how, you know, my question is, how important is that, how important is the aesthetics? And when you're processing, you're processing the images, so you're taking images which we use for one purpose and you're turning them into something that you want people to look at and engage in in a different way, so do they have to be, in a sense, beautiful or do they have to be compelling in that way? Was that part of your considerations in when you were processing the images? And I wonder too, James Gow mentioned an artist that we worked with before Vladimir Miladinovich who redraws documents and I was thinking in your work, in your reprocessing of images, whether there's a process there of your own, your own sort of reckoning with the evidence and thinking about how, not just how you want to present it aesthetically, but what it means and drawing out the meaning from it in the sort of active processing. And then finally, I was intrigued by this idea of purpose again, what the purpose of the images were and particularly look at the target sites. Those original images were for a very different purpose to the one that you'll be producing them for. So the evidence, it was evidence of, it could be taken as evidence of one thing, but then you're using it, or it becomes evidence of something else. And I wondered if you could speak a bit to what you're trying to evidence, what is it that becomes evidence of when you present it in this way. So what's your purpose as an artist in working with the material and presenting it and what are you seeking the evidence, what are you seeking to uncover with this evidence? So I'll leave it there and perhaps turn it back to both of you and then I can see that we've got two hands up already from Mike and Joe. So shall I give you two a chance to comment first and then we'll go back and get Joe and Mike's comments and any others that come in. That's all right. So do you want to go in the order Helen first and then David? Thank you. Thank you for your remark, Rachel. So I will try to make a perfect answer with all the information I collect with your questions. But you ask for what kind of memories do these images, what kind of... For me it was at the beginning it was something really, really personal and it was important for me before I engaged in academic research and artistic research to understand these documents and to keep this link with my family because it's like a family heritage these documents. And so during all my research the turning point of my work was through this concept of the shift of the gaze it was to as an artist to find my place faced to these documents and faced to these images it was to find a position and even if I reused some specific way to specific processes as the same as the military process to work I need at the end of my thesis to as you see under the view of my exhibition to have a different universe to propose another look on these images and because my interest was on the way on how these images were produced on the field and during this conflict in the second time if they are published or if anything else has access it had access at this moment to these documents and in the third time how can I reuse it in another context and my question was if the information which described these pictures if I work on it if the signification of this document will be the same if I decided to show them in a different context and so faced to the audience or faced to the public I consider that anyone can have his own look on this conflict specifically you can create your own memories on this work you can imagine what you want and this was the point the most important thing for me by creating an artistic work with these documents and with these archives to finally at the end create my own story and my own heritage to think about public reflection and public thoughts about the war perception and how we can today how we can have another look on war conflict and far from what we see all the day in the newspaper in the media and on television and on the internet and the temporality too when you are in the context of an exhibition or in a museum the temporality there is something most visual narrative and there is a narration there is something there is a story who is returned at the same time that the audience discovered the work and so it's important to have this new temporality phase two conflicts that's really interesting temporality isn't it the Gulf War was the first visual war that took place on television and so those images are still all around but having your creation of them existing in a certain time and space creates a different form of engagement David I turn to you yeah so well start from the final question so what was the purpose for Cordier for writing his works well I mean there were a number of them the BCRA, the livre blanc that was primarily written as an official history for the benefits of the provisional government of the French Republic so when they'd come back in after the occupation had finished they wanted to put down on paper what the clandestine work that they had been doing and exactly putting it into paper so that people would be able to go and see afterwards and it was quite a prescient thing to do because the following year so we're talking 1946 now there was a the newspapers I think it was Le Monde published a story whereby the head of the BCRA Colonel Passi was accused of having misused some of the funds that were being sent over from London into France and there were accusations that that was being kept in a form of a slush fund to be able to be used politically in the war to influence France as the Gaulists would have wanted that was the accusation the livre blanc was in part a bit of a means of responding to those accusations that had been made by Le Monde but at the same time it was also to put down exactly what had been done from the perspective of the BCRA and what had been done by the resistance in France so that had a very clear objective as to why that piece of work was being written for Cordier's own work when he did the biography of Jean Moulin well that was primarily in response to that television programme that I was referring to in 1977 whereby Henri Frené the leader of combat had previously written a book wherein he accused Jean Moulin of being a crypto communist and effectively supporting the communists to a far greater degree than any of the other French movements so when those accusations were brought up during this particular TV appearance Cordier wanted to be able to respond and say no Moulin wasn't a communist I saw all of what was going on look I've got these pieces of paper that he had had for 30 or 40 years at that point I've never seen them so his reason for writing the biography of Moulin was as a means of refuting what Frené had said that Cordier wasn't a crypto communist and look yet again here is what the BCRA did during the war and here is what Moulin did during the war so that his second work also had quite a there was reasoning behind the writing of it his third book and fourth book the earliest curricula and Victoire and plural were his attempts at putting down his story the way that he wanted it said to recount the details of his life and giving it from his perspective so that was a more of a personal book the biography hence why I think he felt happy with changing the way that he had previously worked which was more akin to a historian going into more of a memorialist putting on his memorialist at if you want so those were the purposes for writing the books they each had a specific purpose but his final books were mostly to get over to new generations exactly what had been the resistance because they were people of anyone younger than about 80 or 90 hadn't experienced the war didn't know what was really happening there were plenty of other accounts he wants to add his account to to the corpus of documents okay yeah I'm just trying to think about some of the other pieces maybe I'll just bring in Joe and Mike here my question is almost a follow-up David on what you were just saying because it strikes me that I mean I'm sure you know this and it's it's it's part of your work so but I mean it's it's it's this is the arc of the story also follows the arc of the reassessment of Vichy right I mean it's the Paxson Revolution so you know how much is this sort of reassessment and what Courtier is doing in the Courtier moment is part of the sort of reassessment and transformation about Vichy yeah so the archivary assessment basically we're going to well to put it briefly the De Gaulle lists insisted that France was liberated by itself that nobody else helped particularly other than oh yes we were allowed to set up set up in the UK we did have a bit of help from the Americans but it was the French who liberated themselves that that was the beginning of the arc Paxton reassessed by going and looking at the Vichy archives and ascertaining that there weren't quite as many resistors as as had been previously said the France wasn't 90% resistors against 10% collaborators Paxton brought that in Courtier the Courtier moment the 1983 conference yeah that that the French inscribed itself into the Paxton reappraisal the reason that they were trying to organize the conference was as a means of effectively giving Courtier the opportunity to present his work in an academic setting whereby he could be interrogated by historians as well as other resistors and in front of the public so that people could see and hear about some of these documents that Courtier had said a few years previously that he had gotten his possession and it was a means of transmitting that to the public prior to the publication of the biography of Moulin which came out a few years later I think about five years later so yeah it totally does fit in with the the arc of reassessment the the meeting in Paris was one of one of the the fundamental steps in the reappraisal that had been kicked off by Robert Paxton but also the the documentary of the sorrow and the pity by Moulin's I think that's the director's name but yeah it certainly inscribed itself into that and then I think the alias curricula and his own biography was his way his own writings were a way of expressing himself and his perspective on what on the war as he saw it that he hadn't been able to previously express yep. Thank you thanks David Mike. Hey thanks great great presentations both I guess my question is primarily for for Helen and it's the way to focus it is a comment that you made Rachel about the you know the purpose of the images and the purposes of the of the of the exhibit and I'm just I'm thinking about the purpose of the collection that piece in between right Helen your father's collection your family heritage I guess what comes to mind is what what archivists refer to as a respect of the importance of preserving a collection as it was as a collection so your father's intent in creating that collection and having to take that and then reorganize it or repurpose it for purposes of creating an exhibit and I'm just wondering I'm curious how that works when it's a family collection I know how it works in an institutional setting and there has to be you know if there's an exhibit created it needs to be then returned to its original state and and you know the you know the collections only a collection if it's preserved in its original format which provides insight into et cetera et cetera et cetera I'm just wondering how important that was to you if it's a factor at all if you've had to basically take the correction the collection reorganize it change it into an exhibit what then happens after is it a permanent exhibit does it get returned into its original state in boxes or what have you I'm just curious about your process and your thinking and priorities when it when it comes to that especially because it's a it's privately owned it's a family collection so you can do what you want with it and in a sense that still preserves that but I guess then there's a disconnect between what your father intended with the collection and then what you would do with it as a family sorry some of that feels like maybe asking very personal questions I'm just I'm very curious thank you for your question it's a very personal question and in fact during all the presentation during all the exhibition I have made to present my work about the first word I've never make any presentation with when you when you saw earlier on the slide the showcase with archives I always present the documents as archives for me they are they are these documents are not anything else they are archives and so that and this this was the most important important things for me it was at the same time yes military documents but it was also an archives and it was a reflection between these two aspects of the documents and so on my process because there is a lot of photographs really a lot and so I've seen everything and I've chosen the most important photographs for me as for example for my project before and after I only I've only chosen some photographs with geographical coordinates to have the exact position of the of the places bombed during the war between Iraq and Kuwait and so I take the picture with me I work with the picture and then when my like my investigation kind of investigation is finished I put the document on the box and that's all and today I consider that my work with this family documents is finished so that's why I explain that my the new project I am developing now in the Gulf region it will be a project with only two big archives because I have done with the person and one I think as there aren't any other questions we will wrap up there with five minutes to spare and hand back over to Mike and Joe who are going to wrap up the day I think so it just remains to say thank you very much once again Helen and David for your presentations and over to you Mike thanks Rachel and thanks David and Helen I think throats are dry and brains are maybe a bit dry at the end of the day so I won't drag this too much probably because I will start slurping my own words and reaching for the water bottle too often just to extend sincere thanks to everybody this has been sort of in Joe's and Mike's brains for a better part of a year and it's been really validating to have this happen and we're grateful to all of you for showing up and presenting such interesting papers right across the board and for such stimulating discussions so my personal thanks to all of you and thanks to the discussants for helping to corral a lot of this and to Joe in particular I would like to thank all of you and I would like to thank all of you just to return the thanks for initially agreeing to set up this weird creature called the conflict records unit within the Michael Howard center and to indulge in the space to start carving out these speaker events and in particular this first conference with all sorts of extenuating factors that come into that like COVID and travel and availability of people I ended up as we were starting to talk about this taking position with the UN which occupies my headspace and my physical location on a pretty intensive sort of basis and so this media and this approach that we took in particular and Ellie helped to shape really worked really really well and I'm really pleased with it so again I'm drawing out so I'll stop with again sincere thanks to everybody I hope it was as worth your while as it was ours