Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 14

Colonial Wars and Aesthetic
Reworking: The Artist as Moral
Witness
Frank Möller
Frank Möller is a Senior Research Fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of
Tampere, Finland, and the co-convenor of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)
Standing Group on Politics and the Arts. He is the author of Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship,
and the Politics of Violence (2013) and the co-editor of Art as a Political Witness (forthcoming).
His most recent publication is Politics and Art, Oxford Handbook Online Political Science
(Oxford University Press).
Abstract
In this article, I analyze Manuel Botelho’s post-factum work on the
Portuguese colonial wars and ask whether the artist qualifies as a witness,
a political witness or even a moral witness as defined by Avishai Margalit.
First, I sketch the historico-political context of the colonial wars and their
commemoration in monuments in Portugal. Secondly, I discuss Botelho’s
aesthetic engagement with soldiers’ subject positions during the wars.
Thirdly, I review Margalit’s approach to being a moral witness. Finally, I think
about both Botelho’s work in light of Margalit’s approach to being a witness
and Margalit’s approach to being a witness in light of Botelho’s work. I argue
that Botelho, without being himself a moral witness as defined by Margalit,
is an intermediary between the moral witness and the moral community,
present and future, helping the members of this community to move from
what it is like to what it feels like to live in extraordinary conditions. Extending
the understanding of being a witness by decoupling it from co-presence and
contemporaneity will enlarge knowledge and help better understand what
it means to witness such highly complex and ambivalent forms of social
interaction as independence wars.
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