Witnessing Witnessing – On the Role of Art and its Audience in Times of Violence
By Judith Sieber
What does it mean or imply to witness something today? Surely, within a western reality people’s relationship to witnessing violence is mostly mediated. For the majority, violence is an exceptional state, even though the reality of structural asymmetries and ongoing wars very much indicate otherwise. Through newspapers and social media, we (in Germany) have been watching and witnessing the genocide in Gaza since 2023 and the Russian Invasion and the ongoing war in Ukraine before that. Especially social media changed the forms of testimonies, their circulation and time to something that can be described a “digital witnessing.”[1] The sharing of testimonies through social media then “makes everyone a potential witness at any given time.”[2] With the thematic focus “Witnessing Witnessing”, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) 2025 took up the question of second degree witnessing “to explore the role of witnesses today, how testimonies – like statements, documents, individual objects or entire archives – shape our view of the world and how they can influence political reality.”[3] However, it goes much further into the actuality, because the term is associated with responsibility, which in turn raises the important question of “what to do”.
This text is not a review of the festival – both the plurality of approaches and the political discussions that took place were far too complex. Rather, it is an attempt to think along the line of three of the films shown and to try to explore the meaning of witnessing in the current moment.
A witness is someone who experiences; who is present in a situation and then recounts; who provides testimony of something that is happening or has happened. Both the presence and the re-telling implies some sort of involvement, an implication in the very least, which is also what makes the testimony relevant to a narration or account of a situation. The idea is that witnesses not only testify in court, but more importantly, that their testimonies are recorded and archived, so that future generations can learn something about the past and the present. But in reality, most witnesses are not heard, their testimonies disappear, they encounter repression or worse. Sometimes their testimony comes to the surface much later, sometimes even too late. Most often they not only witness acts of violence, but also experience structural forms of violence and silencing themselves, which swallow up their voices and make them inaudible. So, then what does it change to say witnessing instead of watching in respect to the activity of audiences at art events or festivals? The shift in language clearly brings the audience closer to the events and people they are seeing and listening to, even if they are far away. Could this be a possible way or start of challenging an overall passivity that is part of the anonymity and darkness of the cinema towards empathy, solidarity, or even towards activism?

Witnessing lies
The German film Das falsche Wort (English The Lie) by Katrin Seybold and Melanie Spitta from 1987 was screened in the afternoon on the second day of the festival in Osnabrück. It is a digitally restored version created by the Film Museum in Munich and was shown for the first time at this year’s Berlinale. The documentary reveals the genocide of the Sinti under the Nazi regime, as well as the ongoing discrimination and denial of justice after the war. This discrimination not only lasted until the 1980s in Germany, but it continues to this day as the daughter of one of the filmmakers, Carmen Spitta, explained in a Q&A after the screening. The film is carried by Melanie Spitta’s voice, herself a daughter of an Auschwitz survivor and an important member of the Sinti community in post war Germany. As a civil rights activist, she fought for women’s rights among the Sinti and society at large, and worked as a consultant and publicist. She was also the first German Sintiza to direct films. Das falsche Wort tells the story of the persecution of the Sinti community from 1936 on when members of the community were transported to a ghetto in Berlin-Marzahn, an open field with old trailers on it. These first deportations happened in preparation of the Olympic Games in Germany, which took place the same year in Berlin. Until the 1980s, there was almost no public awareness of these first ghettos in Germany, which served as interim camps before the large majority of people was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943.[4] A recent article uncovered how the GDR regime tried to hide both the persecution and memory of the Sinti and Roma as well as the historic site in Marzahn.[5]
The film tells the stories through documents, photos and interviews. Sinti survivors tell their story as eyewitnesses of what happened from the 1930s to the 1980s in Germany: the unfolding of early events, especially the year 1936, becomes important later on, when the victims file for reparation in East and West Germany after the war. The reparation for the persecution before 1943 was denied until the release of Das falsche Wort and only later granted partly. Germany also denied the ghettoization from 1936 on and the planned genocide instead of acknowledging the facts – that the Sinti were deported and killed by their fellow Germans as part of a racist ideology and that they were widely studied by racial researchers. All this is documented in archives but was ignored after the war. Even more so, the racial aspect of the persecution of the group of Sinti was denied. Each victim was framed as being arrested under the category of being “anti-social” or criminal. This was an attempt to convey that there was no planned genocide of a community or population, but rather individual arrests of people, who allegedly were out of work, “unwilling to work”, or had broken the law. All these lies, made up by both German states after the war, are revealed through interviews with eyewitnesses in the 1980s as well as through the research of archival documents that were found in the GDR archives in Magdeburg. Not only do the interviews and documents prove the official story wrong, they also point to the continuity of persecution through former Nazi “researchers”, who were consulted as experts and specialists in the court cases of the Sinti after the war. Ignoring their roles as perpetrators in a genocide cynically degraded their victims again. As Spitta herself puts it in the film: “The courts believed the perpetrators, not us, the victims.”
These decisions resulted in no just reparations being paid to the Sinti, who still suffer(ed) from the violence and trauma, and were left with small pensions only, while the German perpetrators got away with their crimes. This overall injustice and denial, shockingly, comes not as a surprise or singularity in German history. Instead, it is the film’s emotional intensity that conveys the survivors’ feelings and points the finger at everyone (who is watching) who allowed what happened and what is happening. This again becomes clear in the conversation after the film with Carmen Spitta, Melanie Spitta’s daughter, herself an activist. Carmen Spitta talked about her mother and the genesis and difficulties of the film projects with Seybold, as there was no big interest in (West) Germany in listening to a Sintiza. She also spoke about her childhood in Buenos Aires, where she – for a short period – visited a school together with the children of high-ranking Nazis, who also fled Germany.
The film and Spitta confront the audience directly: how was and is this continuation of lies and structural violence possible in Germany and why are the witnesses not heard? Spitta’s presence also demonstrates intergenerational work, combining her mother’s films with today’s activist effort. Spitta is often invited to schools to talk about her history. Only a couple of weeks later the new German government announced the defunding of the position of the Federal Government Commissioner against Antiziganism and for the Life of Sinti and Roma in Germany, leaving both communities alone and unprotected.[6] The film powerfully shows how testimonies and archives are ignored and how courts simply construct and defend another “reality”. It asks a question that is still relevant: how are witnesses and truth repressed by the (German) state and society, and when should we all start to rethink our responsibility and implication in that?

Witnessing state violence
It is exactly these questions that Empty Metal (2018) takes up from a very different perspective, a feature film directed by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer from the indigenous-centered art collective New Red Order. The film combines various kinds of material, including found footage primarily depicting police violence, computer-generated simulations of shootings, and audio recordings of interviews with police officers. The film also features an enacted plot centering on the members of a made-up noise band called “Alien”. Over the course of the film, the band members radicalize and kill police officers, all of whom are murderers who were not charged. The plot-driven nature of the film is unusual in the context of the festival that otherwise highlights documentary and experimental approaches. In the end the fictive layer allows the film to open up a set of potentials, and risks giving possible answers to the recurring question of “what to do”.
This quite generic question, “what to do”, is directly asked in an interview with the band in reference to different forms of “art” ( i.e. music, but in a reflexive mode it is also about the film itself). The scene is a cutting comment on the art world or specifically the music scene – three young and bored young people sit in their run-down studio, introduce themselves and the lead singer talks about why they make music:
The privilege to be heard and to be seen and heard as artists and musicians…There is a responsibility that comes with that…We are living in a world that has always been fucked and continues to be …. And the urgency and immediacy of music is somewhat different form other art forms and creative processes… which is what we feel.
After being asked “Why don’t you guys actually do something?” their irritated answering “like what?” demonstrates the limits of their political imagination. The back and forth continues – “social work, work for the government” come up as options – until it becomes clear that the interviewer tries to tease out the distinction between art and activism, and introduces the possibility to actually choose violence. The story unfolds: the three musicians are lurked via telepathy to join a militant organization that is mainly lead by several indigenous activists who fight the government. “We know the murderers, their names and addresses, so why are they still alive?”, one member of the band is asking their friends in order to convince them. The band members give up their music careers and cancel their tour to be assassins, find and kill police officers, who are publicly known to have murdered black people – here the film connects the evidence that was shown earlier to potential responses of political violence.
The interesting point about the film is that the logic does not seem completely wrong. If the belief in justice (as in The Lie) is destroyed, what are good options to make a political change outside the bubble of political art? With the clarity of the evidence of police guilt, structural and state violence and the consequence of the response, the film clearly crosses a line by proposing violence as an option against passivity. This suggestion is also implicitly made to the audience as witnesses who follow the same images and evidence as the band.
US police and state violence as well as its relationship to colonialism are powerfully described by Hazel Carby in her essay We must burn them, in which she also expresses her frustration about silencing in academia:
History is written by the victors, but diligent and continual silencing is required to maintain its claims on the present and future. It is a mistake to believe that white supremacy is something nurtured and reproduced by extremist organisations and ‘bad apples’ in the armed forces and police. White supremacy is ubiquitous in the US. It operates in the most mundane aspects of daily life; in the economic order that decides who has what and how they get it; in the historical amnesia that makes some stories disappear; in the language we use to speak and name the past.[7]
Empty Metal proposes a position that is contrary to the position of the passive viewer and thus explores an important question: what is the relationship between art and activism? And, how far would we (as audience) go when witnessing state violence?
Ongoing Erasure
Vents Violents (Two letters to Chantal Akerman) from 2025 takes a start with an observation about the last film of Chantal Akerman: In No Home Movie (2015) she used images from the Al-Naqab desert in Israel/Palestine as counter-shots to a portrait of her old mother in her apartment in Brussels. Akerman’s mother was a holocaust survivor; the intergenerational trauma and Akerman’s own depression are underlying recurring topics in all her films. The Israeli directors Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat observed that the desert in “No Home Movie” is unnamed, “generic”, but they, partly coming from that region, recognized it. Their film followed and documents Akerman’s route in 2015. But instead of showing only the landscape they portray the rest of the Palestinian Bedouin life in the desert, mainly through animals and plants, but also showing the tourism and Israeli settlements and industry. The voice-over, first in French, then in Yiddish, are two letters addressed to Akerman, who committed suicide shortly after finishing her last film. They are personal, but also political, addressing the erasure of Palestinian life that takes place in this desert since 1948, therefore the “desert that can no longer stay generic”. The camera moves on and follows the route to the site of Masada, a tourist spot. Masada is a fortress in Israel, famous for the siege by the Romans in 73 AD and the subsequent decision of the Jewish defenders to commit suicide rather than surrender. The voice-over in Yiddish speaks about the Zionist pilgrimage site that reinforces the story of the historical mass suicide of Jews as a heroic act of resistance. The voice asks how this story and the intergenerational trauma can be interrupted. The film ends in Paris at the closed gates of the cemetery where Akerman is buried. The closed gates – due to strong winds, violent vents, as a sign indicated, leave the film without closure and without reconciliation. Being finished in 2025 the film’s end reads more as an interruption, it leaves the events after 2015, especially after 2023, unspoken of.
Watching Vents Violents what comes to mind is Adania Shibli’s book Minor Detail, that partly portraits the other side of the desert, close to Gaza, and also speaks of the erasure that is happening there since 1948. The Palestinian author combines two stories, an account of violence from the time of the Israeli occupation of the desert in 1948 and a current one in which the narrator, in search of evidence and facts, visits the site but finds only fragments, or minor details, due to the ongoing erasure of history. The narrator drives around in her car and gets lost between different maps, the Israeli map of the area, which gives no evidence of the history, and the Palestinian map of the area from 1948, which only shows what has long since disappeared. Being committed but also unable to uncover the whole truth she tries „to reconstruct something’s appearance, or an incident one has never witnessed, simply by noticing various little details which everyone else finds to be insignificant.”[8]
As Israeli violence continues and attempts to erase Palestinian life intensify, intergenerational forms of witnessing and resistance, attention to detail and the (re)naming of places become increasingly important. Witnessing is an active process that ranges from small observations and interventions, to forms of resistance and activism. All of these forms require questioning one’s position and complicity.
Possibilities
What all films have in common is that they deal with forms of violence that structure the (different) world(s) we live in today. How and from where they talk about violence is connected to the question of witnessing. Witnessing can be described as an intergenerational trauma and activist work, witnessing can lead to the realization that one must take an active role, even if it leads to further violence, and can be described as a form of documentation of ongoing erasure. Through the medium of film, a shared responsibility in shaping and changing the world is addressed. This ultimately evokes forms of solidarity and activism that come from witnessing. Art and especially film can be powerful tools in this process.
Notes
[1] Kot S, Mozolevska A and Polishchuk O (2024). Digital war diaries: Witnessing the 2022 Russian War against Ukraine. Memory, Mind & Media 3, e15, pp. 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/mem.2024.11
[2] Schankweiler K, Straub V and Wendl T (eds.) (2018), Image Testimonies: Witnessing in Times of Social Media, 1st ed. Routledge, p. 1, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429434853.
[3] https://www.emaf.de/en/theme/
[4] See the website of the memory site with interviews of survivors: https://www.gedenkstaette-zwangslager-marzahn.de/rundgang/zwangslager-marzahn.html
[5] For example: https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1190939.sinti-und-roma-verdraengt-und-unerinnert.html
[6] https://taz.de/Schutz-von-Sinti-und-Roma/!6087369/
[7] Hazel V. Carby, We must burn them: Against the Origin Story, in London Review of Books, Vol. 44 No. 10 · 26 May 2022, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n10/hazel-v.-carby/we-must-burn-them. Like Empty Metal, Carby’s text also lists acts police violence in the US, mainly against Black Lives Matter protesters as well as peaceful protesters against the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, noting that “Amnesty International documented 125 separate incidents of state violence against peaceful protesters in forty states, plus the District of Columbia, between 26 May and 5 June 2020.”
[8] Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, Fitzcarraldo Edition 2020, pp. 63–64.
About the Author
Judith Sieber is an art historian and writer. She completed her PhD at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2023 as part of the graduate program “Cultures of Critique”. Her research interests include questions of the representation of time and history in art and visual culture. She currently works at the Forum Transregionale Studien as the project coordinator for BEYONDREST. Her dissertation “Die Erfindung des Zeitstrahls” was published in April 2025.
Citation: Judith Sieber, Witnessing Witnessing – on the Role of Art and its Audience in Times of Violence, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 29.07.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/60356
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (July 29, 2025). Witnessing Witnessing – On the Role of Art and its Audience in Times of Violence. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved April 16, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14g2i


