Before the official start of the Victims' Symptom project commissioned by LabforCulture and curated by Ana Peraica, planned for early this year, a series of interviews with renowned specialists are being published on the Victims’ Symptom blog, addressing a number of key questions from Peraica’s curatorial statement:

Why does the mass media prefer to talk in terms of numbers of corpses, calculating them morbidly, with apparent disregard for the victims’ status? Do numbers matter? Or is each loss a single one?

Does the number of victims reported by the media’s “truth speaking” make any real difference or is it self-feeding the spectacle that cannot report on few? Who earns on death? Is there a bureaucracy of death? What is the dominant exchange rate between civilians and soldiers, our victims and their victims?

Is the cultural production of victims preventing us from seeing the actual victims? Are we going to really see what happened only after a sufficient number of movies, novels and theses are published on massacres? Is earning a degree on a massacre ethical? How can denying one lead to no consequence?

Are we losing our capacity for empathy? Are we victimised ourselves? Is there a therapy for such a world?

So far, interviews with the following theorists, artists and specialists have been published:

Sue Golding (aka Johnny de Philo)

Noam Chomsky

Anur Hadziomerspahic

Enrique Arroyo

Joseph De Lappe

Carlos Motta

Peter Fuchs

The series will continue with more interviews with key figures such as as Alfredo Jaar, Ariella Azoulay, and Agricola de Cologne. Interviews are conducted by curator Ana Peraica and assistant Marko Stamenkovic and are published weekly.

Besides commenting, we invite you to send your proposals with questions or full interviews to shape the upcoming discussions.