Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 16

world” (Couto ����:���). “War,” however, “leaves wounds that no amount of
time can heal” (Couto ����:���)—wounds from which not only those against
whom atrocities were committed continue to suffer but also those distant
witnesses for whom these atrocities were only rumors.
This article is an engagement with the idea of the artist as a witness. It is
located in the independence wars fought by then Portuguese colonies in
Africa, and it discusses artworks that were produced a long time after these
wars ended. But, in a sense, these wars did not end—“war leaves wounds
that no amount of time can heal.” This open-endedness—“the event-asaftermath”
(Roberts ����:���)—is one way of understanding the post-factum
artist as a witness. � The article discusses artworks that were produced by
a Portuguese artist, Manuel Botelho, an artist who did not participate in
these wars; nevertheless, he suffered from them or, more precisely, from his
nonparticipation in wars in which he was supposed to participate. Artists
like Botelho may be witnesses of atrocities they were supposed to commit
but didn’t, of suffering they were supposed to inflict on others and endure
themselves but didn’t, and of experiences they were supposed to make but
didn’t.
I refer to this artist as a witness, and it is one purpose of this article to try to
understand what kind of witness he is. All the things he did not do render
difficult a conventional understanding of him as a witness. Another purpose
of this article is to get engaged with the dichotomy victim–perpetrator
aiming, without belittling the suffering of the victims, to show its inadequacy
in this particular historical case. I do not make any claims beyond the case
I investigate in this article. The third, and final, purpose of this article is
the investigation of the idea of the artist as a moral witness, derived from
Avishai Margalit’s work. While this seems to be an ambitious objective for
an article, I would argue that these three objectives are inter-connected and
that engagement with all of them in one article is not only possible but,
indeed, necessary.
The first step is to sketch the historico-political context of the colonial wars
and their commemoration in monuments in Portugal. In a second step, I
present and discuss Botelho’s aesthetic engagement with soldiers’ subject
positions during the wars. In a third step, I review Margalit’s concept of being
a moral witness. Finally, staging a kind of imagined dialog between a scholar
and an artist, 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
�
For “the post-factum witness,” see Lowe (����:���).
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