The eye of war II

The history of war is the history of an eye gradually becoming a weapon. Thanks to different flying machines, the desire to gaze down from great heights spread spectacularly at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. This momentum towards flight and seeing things from the sky paved the way for limitless over-excitation, and later for surveillance and the transformation of air-borne objects into killing machines. In this sense, the most appropriate, or at least most realistic definition of a drone may be “a flying, high-resolution camera armed with missiles”. However, it is important to remember that its feats in the field of optical consistency have been imagined before, and have their own historicity. The emergence of any technical object goes back to the existence of a device, and a device has a lineage that works thanks to an imaginary space where it would come to foreshadow the technical object itself.

Over the course of three conferences and a later round table, we will explore these phenomena at the crossroads of hunting, security logic, modern warfare and its media coverage, and the blurring of fantasy and reality so unique to our modern times.

PROGRAM

Conferences

Ignacio Mendiola. Security, war, and manhunts (EU)

On the basis of the current security context that outlines the fabrication of threats mainly aimed at migration and terrorism, we are witnessing the proliferation of a whole series of practices and devices that are directly cast upon the bodies of threatening subjects. The aim will be to analyse this collection of forms for making, thinking, and feeling secure through the image of a manhunt. In this sense, hunting the dehumanised subject that incarnates the threat becomes the quintessential face of the bellicose logic that pervades hegemonic discourse on security.

Joseba Zulaika. Drones and wars (EU)

The United States developed and used military drones on a massive scale for the “War on Terror”. The war in Ukraine is the first to have both parties using thousands of drones, elevating them to the status of essential combat weapon for future wars. This seminar will address the ethical and legal problems arising from this, as well as the trauma and resistance stirred up by the use of drone-robots in the context of new forms of warfare.

Olatz González Abrisketa. Shoot like a hero: sexual trajectories and projects of the modern nation (ES)

Sara, 1947. A double relief in memory of a young local man, Victor Ithurria, hangs on the side wall of the town’s central square. Superimposed are Victor the pelota player, and Victor the soldier. This monument reveals a fundamental historical node in the intimate relationship between war and sport, and the displacement of women in the modern national imagination. What is the place of the projectiles that Ithurria has in his hands -pelota and grenades- in this equation? How are proto-agonic bodies trained? What role does optics play in all of this?

Round table

• Participants: Ignacio Mendiola, Joseba Zulaika, Olatz González Abrisketa
• Moderator: Oier Etxeberria