<nettime> re: no amnesty in italy

[matthew fuller <matt@axia.demon.co.uk>]

As an aside to the recent posting to nettime by Jim Fleming of the 
apparent removel of any prospects for an amnesty for those accused of 
action as part of the Red Brigades, accusations which have always 
been of less investigatory value than fishing expeditions, and which 
function as a punitive blocking of memory rather than any desire to 
reach back in the name of 'justice', a recent web-based 'docufiction' 
revisits these events.

"NothingButTheTruth is an online docufiction in which ever multiplying
options offer narrative fragments (photographs,sound) as public and private
perspectives of a series of political events in Italy, from the 1970's to
the present."

NothingButTheTruth by Sigunne Hamann and Nicholas Ridout is online at 
NothingButTheTruth.org.uk


The aesthetic is very much of associational collaging, fragment upon 
fragment. No-one is fingered as enunciator of the phrases, voices 
come from nowhere to shift the blame or mutter in confusion. 
Previous multimedia works working on this area, such as 'Strago de 
Stato' by Strano Network and the CDROM 'Annunciation' by Cesare 
Davolio, on the Moro kidnapping published by Mediamatic have followed 
a documentary line, but also take advantage of the crooked lines of 
argument allowed by random access.  Here, some of the layers of 
fabrication, doubt and outrage are missed in a way precisely because 
the voices come from anywhere: there's no telling whether they are 
from a magistrate, a cop, someone caught in a bomb blast, a 
journalist.  It is the position from which a phrase or statement is 
recorded, from which it is made, the networks of filiations and 
powers that it implies, that also makes it political, loaded, valent 
rather than floating.

At the same time, the obvious afinity this sequence of interlocked 
events and processes and others like them has, even on the poetic, 
simply associational, level, with potential for investigation and 
involvement within a media that offers us the insight that, like the 
convulsive politics of macro and micro-states, beneath every cave is 
a deeper and more tortuous cavern, suggests that there's work that 
can be done here.

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