The Art of Compassion: Sensing War Experience in Chechnya

The paper discusses aesthetics and the sensing and imagining of sound and movement in the research material on war experience in Chechnya. The paper shares narratives of war experience from literature and documentary film sources as examples of healing and compassion which disturb the dominant affective economy of war – fear, anger and resentment. The paper presentation will take the form of singing, and the songs presented will be based on the narratives shared in the paper, thus adding to the interpretative layer and enabling an active engagement with emotions. In the songs of the presentations, and in the narratives of the paper, the researcher meets and honours those who have shared their war experience in public. Art is created and analysed simultaneously in the study of war experience in Chechnya following the methodology of joy.