Material witnesses are nonhuman entities and machinic ecologies that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into a history. Material witnesses operate as double agents: harboring direct evidence of events as well as providing circumstantial evidence of the interlocutory methods and epistemic frameworks whereby such matter comes to be consequential. Material witness is, in effect, a Möbius-like concept that continually twists between divulging “evidence of the event” and exposing the “event of evidence.”

In developing the concept of the material witness I have examined a wide range of materials that have recorded trace evidence of the violence that generated their contexts as well as explored the institutional and disciplinary protocols that enable their latent histories to be rendered intelligible and made to speak, even if their “speech acts” often fall upon deaf ears or challenge accepted truths. Indeed, what the material witness highlights is the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, soliciting questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. Consequently, the project also reflects upon the specific requirements that must be met to secure “legitimate” acts of witnessing, from legal tribunals to climate change summits, as they adjudicate over whether certain kinds of observational practices and testimonial methods should be enlisted or rejected. It is within these institutional forums that “witnessing” can itself be witnessed, for it is here that it achieves its most prominent articulation as a distinct realm of procedural expression subject to agreed-upon conventions that turn on questions of expertise and direct experience.

As a conceptual imperative and practical project, my aim is ultimately to relink the material world and its affordances with the space of the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.