ABSTRACT
Where is the conflict? This is the question Eric Lesdema asks with his photographic series Life Day – Fortunes of War.2 The question is asked obliquely yet relentlessly, haunting the bodies, and the spaces between those bodies. Every single image booms with the question, planting in the viewer the compulsive urge to find the conflict, folded somewhere between the material of the image and the bodies represented in it. We are all captured in this search, in our turn performing what we unconsciously do anyway: we populate space with conflict and its violence, and we position ourselves in relation to it, whether this might be in the deep end or at a distance, taking sides or blocking the conflict from our view. These images render one complicit with the conflict they capture. They set up their temporal and spatial parameters in such a way that they annul any easy hope of escaping violence. They render conflict the main ontological condition of our time, and us complicit with its emergence. This is the reason for which Lesdema’s work has stirred so much interest in terms of thinking, observation and analysis.3
