“Victim” is one of the most frequently used words by news agencies. It appears just as regularly in different languages (for example: victima/victimas, victime, sinister, supplicie, vittima, žrtva, viktimë, жертва, فريسة, ضحية, قتيل, (ש"ע) קרבן… ). Through the media, victims become symbols of contemporary society, communicating society’s negative desire for revenge.

So why does the mass media prefer to talk in terms of numbers of corpses, calculating them morbidly, with apparent disregard for the victims’ status? Does the number of victims reported by the media’s “truth speaking” make any real difference? Is there a sophist paradox between a number and a mass of victims? From what point do we stop talking about victims andstart talking about genocide and mass murder? [1]

And how are we affected by numbers of dead bodies? Why is an image of a dead body meaningful in some societies while in other societies it loses its capacity to provoke anger or compassion, but rather serves to produce attitudes? Is seeing a dead body actually losing its traumatic capacity or has our culture arrived at the point of chronic denial? Are we already suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – or PTSD?

Victims’ Symptom (PTSD and Culture) – curated by Ana Peraica – attempts to move forward the notion of PTSD from psycho-traumatic diagnosis to a symptomatic term in media studies. The project will analyse the meaning of a victim who has survived a traumatic event, becoming both a witness and a suffering subject. PTSD is institutionalised at an economic, social and political level, contrary to the merely enumerated victims who have only a legal and a cultural role. PTSD is usually diagnosed in individuals (rather than groups) surviving an event that ranges outside our normal experience. We will explore whether mediated culture can traumatise. If not – has the world become immune to trauma…?

These questions will be analysed in an online collaborative project on LabforCulture.org, produced in several phases/layers; including research, documentation, an online debate featuring theoretical texts (using the curatorial statement below as a starting point), and also a series of commissioned artworks.

Between the “confession of a victim” appearing in blogs and the “role of the victim” appearing in a mass media that treats people not as individuals but as illustrations for mass daily war reporting, totally disinterested in their individuality, the project is a shift (in the curatorial sense), tunneling through different information.

The project will connect artists and theorists in online discussions on various platforms, as well as anyone else interested debating concepts of the victim, victimisation [2] and the institutionalisation of victims. Its goal is therefore to de-construct and de-activate the emancipated “third agent” construction of victims by the media, which acts as an intermediary between the different sides of war.

Commissioned as a special initiative to mark LabforCulture’s one-year anniversary, the project, accompanied by critical texts, documentation and reflections by the curator and a number of other participants throughout the project, will go live on the site in early 2008. A first discussion around the themes of Victims’ Symptom will take place at a roundtable discussion on the notion of the “extreme” at the MutaMorphosis Conference, celebrating 40 years of the journal Leonardo, in Prague from November 8-10, 2007. First comments and debate will be posted on the Victims’ Symptom blog on LabforCulture.org from this point onwards.

Notes
[1] Especially in regard to the cases of Vukovar and Srebrenica.
[2] See Victimisation in Victimology (Wikipedia).