Rwanda is Not a Piece of Art.

“It is shocking to see how artists normalize atrocities,” lawyer Jan Hofdijk wrote to the director of the centre for art and architecture Stroom Den Haag after attending the opening of its exhibition Model Court: An Ecology of the Courtroom and the corresponding live teleconference on the weekend of 14 and 15 February 2014. Model Court is an ongoing collaboration between London-based artists, researchers Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oliver Rees and architect Lorenzo Pezzani, which explores the shifting infrastructures of international justice. Central to their artistic research is the Finnish trial of François Bazaramba, a Rwandan pastor who was accused of genocide against Tutsis in 1994. Model Court’s film RESOLUTION 978 HD and live teleconference in The Hague examine the way in which the trial and the principle of universal jurisdiction on which it is based are both facilitated and interrupted by media technologies.1

During the artists’ talk and teleconference, Hofdijk raised his voice repeatedly, taking the opportunity to loudly protest the mock trial of his own client, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, who has been incarcerated for fifteen years on the basis of false evidence, so the lawyer claims. Hofdijk was astounded by the naiveté of the three artists present, and even went so far as to ask them if the Rwandan government had sponsored their film. With this insinuation, the clash between the worlds of art and law immediately became apparent: where Hofdijk spoke of truth-finding, the artists talk about truth-production; where the lawyer claims that the Rwandan genocide is too big an issue for art, the artists see the genocide trial as an interesting case study for media theory. The weekend at Stroom raises fundamental questions about the problematic relations between truth, justice and ethics, and the role of artists and curators within these philosophical realms of knowledge and power.

In RESOLUTION 978 HD, the artists have blurred the faces of the witnesses at the request of Chief Investigator Elfgren to avoid their being identified. The artists scrutinize Elfgren’s takes of the trial and the infrastructure that was built to facilitate justice. Interweaving fast-forward scenes from Elfgren’s private home videos in Rwanda with takes of the trial sessions inside the courtrooms and shots of the scene outside, the artists explore the implications and effects of the use of media technology in the application of the ‘juridical utopia’ of universal jurisdiction in this specific trial. The video is divided into chapters with test-patterns containing titles: Crime Scene, Translation, Tele-Presence, Interference, Transmission, Exposure, Truth Production and Memory. A voiceover alternately represents Elfgren, the prosecutors, the defence lawyers and the judges, playing the dual role of interpreter and commentator. Only twice is the voice of the artists themselves heard in the film, when they pose a question directly to the viewer and at the end, when they draw a conclusion. The viewer follows the convoluted process of truth-finding, starting with the complexities of translating Kinyarwanda to Swedish and French to Finnish and back again, and continuing with the disturbances caused by the small bandwidth of the Internet connection, the large number of links in the data transmissions, the amount of moisture in the cables and the torrents of rain that make all testimonies inaudible and lead to power cuts.

Technology is not as neutral as it seems, as Walter Benjamin already pointed out in 1936 with his influential essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The lens of a camera shows aspects that cannot be seen by the naked eye, for example by zooming in and out and changing its angle, which makes the camera an independent actor. Tellingly, the voiceover in the film recounts the complaints of the judges, who have trouble making out the facial expressions of the witnesses, whose dark skin blends into the dark mahogany behind them. The judges’ inability to see people’s involuntary reactions, which often expose the truth, is reflected by the camera’s exposure rate: the default ‘Zebra’ setting is good for capturing the expressions on the faces of the white judges, but makes black holes out of the faces of the Rwandan witnesses – and, one has to presume, the face of the accused. How can the judges and lawyers examine the demeanour of the witnesses if their faces are illegible? Decades earlier, in 1977, the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard had refused to use Kodak film when he was on an assignment in Mozambique to develop a new model for a national television station at the invitation of a newly-elected president, because the emulsion didn’t capture details on dark skins, it was inherently ‘racist’.3

The climatical and technical problems pale, however, when the film introduces a man identified in the judgement as Filip Reyntjens, Professor of African Law and Politics at Antwerp University, who presents the Rwandan notion of ubgenge, which translates as cleverness, acting or speaking strategically: “in other words, lying”. This professor would not trust a Rwandan to tell the truth, he says, “or at least talk the truth the same way a Finnish person would”. Considering that the trial, and later the appeal, were deliberately set in the Finnish legal system, the fundamental juridical principle of a ‘fair trial’ suddenly turns sour, although the judgment notes: “…the premise cannot be adopted that cultural aspects as such would serve to reduce the value of witness accounts.”4

The goal of the teleconference was twofold. The first aim was to discuss the politics of media technologies, their central role in exercising the principal of universal jurisdiction and how they condition and reconfigure the space of law. The second goal was more philosophically and culturally charged: how does this decentralized media apparatus highlight the problems surrounding the application of international justice and relations between nations? Lorenzo Pezzani referred to the map that Model Court made for their exhibition at Stroom, a visual representation of universal jurisdiction cases in the world, which still happen along colonial lines from North to South, with mainly European countries using the principle of universal jurisdiction to prosecute crimes in their former colonies but staying away from crimes committed by people from the Western part of the world. A white man’s justice is imposed on the rest of the world, according to Zoran Pajić, thereby confirming the accusation that international justice is yet another tool in the service of neo-colonial interests. Murtaza Jaffer acknowledges that while nobody can ignore this discussion, it formally is not an issue at the ICTR, nor at the other international tribunals. Jin Ho Verdonschot often experiences in Kenya that people watch trials against Kenyans by muzungu (the African name for white people) in The Hague, and have no idea that justice is being done in their name. Even worse, claims Zoran Pajić, viewers in the home countries see a well-fed, well-groomed gentleman or lady who in no way resembles the perpetrator they know. This gap between the reality of the survivors, who often live in atrocious circumstances, and the reality of their tormentors, who are housed in comfortable detention centres in The Hague and other Western cities, completely alienates and even annuls the expectations of victimized communities that seek a restoration of their dignity and integrity through the process of justice. Tara O’Leary signals that even though universal justice is preferable to no justice at all, the effect of the images that are projected back to the communities must be taken into account. Does the Rwandan public opinion think that justice is being served?

The format of the teleconference replicates the trial and offers a real-time and real-life experience of the many snags in transmitting data from one device to the other and from The Hague to several other locations in the world. But as the Belgian artist Ronny Heiremans heatedly argues, what is missing here is media critique. The participants in the teleconference seem to think that an image equals reality, but “basically we are looking at five mug shots and we pretend that they are real.”6 The fact that this conference is being recorded, as were the trials, already changes the way a person speaks and acts, their perspective of their own position in the debate. The professionals in this teleconference are obviously used to functioning in this media space, but do witnesses or members of a public jury really understand the difference between an image on a screen or a voice on a speaker and a real person? Do media-illiterate people who participate in teletrials need training to understand how technology changes the perception of a space, and of everyone acting in it? Murtuza Jaffer also warns that teletrials will obstruct the real purpose of trials, which is not only societal revenge and the conviction of criminals, but also reconciliation, especially in situations of mass crime. It is impossible to have reconciliation in a virtual space; people need to be eyeball to eyeball, or as Walter Benjamin would put it, in the here and now.

Lawyer Jan Hofdijk’s accusation that artists normalize atrocities gives too much credit to the influence of art. The film RESOLUTION 978HD will never be used as material evidence in a genocide trial, nor will the artists be called to testify for or against any person accused of committing a crime against humanity. Model Court doesn’t even have the intention of following in the footsteps of the writer Émile Zola, who accused the French government of anti-Semitism and the unlawful jailing of army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which led to the famous Dreyfus affair and ultimately to his exoneration.

The legitimacy of Model Court to research a real case of genocide can be affirmed, however. Model Court has thrown a new light on a trial of universal jurisdiction, using research on media technology as a wrench to question such complex issues as the production of images and media awareness, colonial heritage and the juridical utopia of universal justice. It calls into question the status of images, the cultural, political and social aspects of the production of images and uses artistic means to discuss the effects of live streaming on the timing and spacing of the law itself.

Model Court: An Ecology of the Courtroom at Stroom Den Haag is on until March 30 and comprises the film RESOLUTION 978 HD (commissioned by Gasworks, London in 2012), the registration of the live teleconferencing event focusing on the impact of media technologies on the trial of Rwandese genocide suspect François Bazaramba, a diagram of the courtroom and a map of universal jurisdiction. The exhibition is part of See You in The Hague (www.seeyouinthehague.nl), a multifaceted narrative about the ambitions and reality of The Hague as International City of Peace and Justice.