Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 30

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC AND HUMANITARIAN NARRATIVES
Deconstructing Musical Humanitarian Narratives
In early 2017, Stephanie Weber, curator for contemporary art at the Lenbachhaus in
Munich, commissioned me to do a video piece for the exhibition After the Fact. Propaganda
in the 21 st century. This atypical art exhibition explored current forms and methods
of propaganda in times of post-truth politics, looking at the concept of propaganda
“as a complex and potentially helpful tool of analysis and thought” (Weber and Mühling
2017:6). For several years, I was working on the complementary dimension of academic
research and artistic work, and the commission from the Lenbachhaus was a great opportunity
to develop this further. The result was Reflections on Music and Propaganda, a
video piece I did as electroacoustic music composer with the Venezuelan video artist
Sergio Santamaría Borges, which expanded and completed in a particular way my research
on the role of humanitarian songs in the depoliticisation of armed conflicts and
the moralisation of international relations at the end of the Cold War. 5
Our artistic work started from the recognition of the emotional power of humanitarian
songs and media narratives which accompanied them. We wanted to deconstruct their
emotional dimension through the montage, collage, and overlapping of statements from
“humanitarian” musicians, TV images that accompanied the songs, and excerpts of video
clips, all of them produced between 1984 and 2014. No other material was used or
added, just images, words, gestures, and sounds that were scattered in a flow of information.
Our objective was to reveal the ethical contradictions and the political implications
of their recurrent and redundant humanitarian narratives. In other words, the “theatrical
arrangement that separates safe spectators from vulnerable others and communicates its
moral message through the staging of spectacles of suffering” (Chouliaraki 2013:27).
Figure 2. Luis Velasco-Pufleau and Sergio Santamaría Borges, Reflections on Music and
Propaganda, 2017, Video. Commissioned by Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und
Kunstbau München. 6
5 The title of the work is borrowed from my article “Reflections on music and propaganda” (Velasco
Pufleau 2014), which at that time was being translated into German (Velasco Pufleau 2017) to be
published in the exhibition book with several historical essays by Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht,
Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, and more recent thoughts by Lucy R. Lippard, Coco Fusco, and Dan
Graham among others.
6 https://youtu.be/23yinuDCeH4.
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