War on war! Artful weapons in times of war and conflict

This chapter considers the power that cultural practices have to respond to the emergencies of war. Can aesthetic methodologies operate as active weapons against or within war, or do they merely fulminate from the ‘side-lines’? To explore this question, the chapter engages closely with two practices forged nearly a century apart - namely that of Bertolt Brecht and Forensic Architecture. Both practices, it argues, deploy ‘truth’ as an aesthetic weapon within war. In this way, they seek to interfere, actively and militantly within war ‘itself’, by shifting the very parameters on which war operates, is understood, justified, or indeed is overlooked as a form of warfare at all.