Abstract The Afterimage of Violence: Frames and Responsiveness in the Three Films Also Known as Jihadi, Umdrehen and When Things Occur This thesis explores the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in relation to artistic strategies that confront political violence in artistic lens-based media. It aims to expand understandings of the possibilities and limitations of depicting violent real-world events and investigates how images of violence elicit responses from viewers. This study focuses on three art films—Also Known as Jihadi (2017), Umdrehen (2022), and When Things Occur (2016)—that grapple with different instances of violence, examining their affective, embodied, and non-representational perspectives. The films are analyzed through a triangulation of Jacques Rancière's concept of the "distribution of the sensible," Judith Butler's notion of the frame, and Jill Bennett's idea of the transactive potential harbored in artworks. Drawing on Butler's question regarding the norms that govern which lives are recognized as human and worthy of protection, the thesis argues that the three art films function as afterimages of violence, which orchestrate affective responses and ethical engagement with the suffering of others. The analysis delves into the artistic strategies employed by the films to generate a more nuanced understanding of political violence, highlighting the interplay between cognitive associations, affective forces, and embodied perception. It explores the relationship between representation and responsiveness, investigating how art can disrupt established notions and judgments surrounding violent events and the lives affected by them. By analyzing the three selected films, the thesis articulates how art can generate critical engagement with political violence and cultivate empathic concern. The research aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the aesthetic and ethical implications of representing violence, emphasizing the potential of art to transform perceptions, foster new modes of seeing, and engender ethical responses.

This practice-based thesis presents the results of experimental research devoted to ethnic tourism among the Kayan minority and has involved the interconnection of artistic and anthropological languages. Known worldwide for the traditional female custom of wearing a long coiled brass necklace aimed at causing a considerable extension to the neck, the Kayan are a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group originally from Burma. Due to the prolonged civil war in their own homeland, a large number of Kayan recently fled from Burma to refuge in neighbouring Thailand. Here, over the past years, in response to the “incisive” tourism policy promoted by the Thai government in the northern areas of the country, some families, abandoning the refugee camps where they were hosted, have been resettled in several new villages open to tourists, on payment of a modest entrance fee. Here the Kayan, their culture and their daily life, have been transformed into an authentic tourist attraction capable of drawing about 10,000 visitors a year. Founded on a strictly “visual media primitivist” approach and inspired by its peculiar aesthetics – as systematically presented in the first, theoretical, section of the thesis –, the enquiry involves a multimedia perspective. In such a context, analogue photography and filmmaking, creative writing and sound composition have been combined to give concrete shape to an original artwork firmly grounded in ethnographic practice. The choice, far from being a solely arbitrary and subjective option, has indeed been motivated by the critical employment of specific theoretical assumptions of some of the most recent streams of anthropology and epistemology of the human sciences. The multidisciplinary methodology adopted to develop the research, as well as the multifaceted language employed to display its results, represent an innovative and experimental way of approaching the complex theme of cultural identity in present-day Asian contexts, as well as of highlighting the most aesthetic and philosophic implications connected to the revival of analogue vintage media in contemporary artistic practice.