How can we think about war and its representation? Emeric Lhuisset has been working on these questions for over 20 years; in his series Théâtre de guerre (Theatre of War), he explored the staging and dramaturgy of conflict alongside a Kurdish guerrilla group between 2010 and 2012, while his project Last Water War in 2016 attempted to depict a coming war in southern Iraq.
In 2016-2017, he was confronted with the complete lack of images of the uprising in many Kurdish cities in Turkey and realised that a conflict without images had no justification in the eyes of the world. So he set out to give the conflict iconography. In the meantime, he tried to circumvent the Turkish government’s censorship process in order to talk about rewriting and erasing history in relation to this territory.
Emeric Lhuisset has carried out several projects in Ukraine since 2014. First, he dismantled propaganda by giving voice directly to the protagonists, allowing them to reclaim their own history. Then, more recently, drawing a parallel between past and present history, he raises the issue of colonialism in the context of the Ukrainian situation, highlighting the importance of both culture and historical narrative in this conflict. Let us not forget that culture is also a weapon in the vast theatre of war.