Bearing Witness: A Study of Shadows, Dreams, and Tales

This paper tries to locate (and in the process, perhaps, create) a space for a particular kind of entity, formulated here, as the witness. The unfolding occurs through looking, in particular, at art installations by Mounir Fatmi, and particular moments in three movies from Andrei Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. However, what also comes to the fore, is the conceptualisation of ‘narratives’, primarily in the working out of the multifarious ways in which they (narratives) seek to (re-/)create, not only ‘events’ or the spaces of/for occurrences themselves, but also the mediums which, in the process of communicating/translating ‘meaning’, are transformed themselves. Following which the question emerges: where does one then begin to look for the witness?