The Vanishing Vanishing-Point : Violence prevention through civil imagination

Abstract

In their video The Vanishing Vanishing-Point (2015), contemporary artists Effi & Amir depict the death of a mundane yet exceptional olive tree. Utilizing Google Street View and Google Earth, the video highlights temporal ruptures in the tree’s photographic documentation in order to expose a field of socio-political violence surrounding the tree’s demise. In this essay, I demonstrate how the artwork adopts a lens of ‘forensic aesthetics’ both to interrogate this complex field of culpability and to advocate an approach of violence prevention through civil imagination. The Vanishing Vanishing-Point emphasizes the need for a plural, ‘civil gaze’ (Azoulay, 2012) in order to understand the composite, multiple ‘events of photography’ surrounding the tree’s untimely death and to prevent such future acts of aggression.