SmallWar

“There are always going to be bigmouths who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life,” purrs the autotuned accent of Valentijn Dhaenens. They’ve had their chance to speak: BigMouth, back the Traverse this year, was a mash-up of grandstanding oratory that took entire nations into war. SmallWar gives those dispatched to fight the chance to answer back.

Once again, Dhaenens threads together a chorale from fragments of found text – from soldier’s diaries and letters home this time, drawn from battlezones across history.

Dhaenens enters in a grey nurse’s uniform, pushing a metal bedframe containing a wounded soldier as seen on a plasma screen. A phone rings and, each time, the soldier’s soul gets up to answer it, until four uniformed projections—all recorded by Dhaenens—stand side by side, as if the dead have fallen in. It’s a thoughtful image of the limbo of war that conjures the numbers that fall and their awful anonymity.

However, being largely recorded, SmallWar lets its audience off. The absence is haunting, but the words don’t count for much. They become a general soundtrack: meditative, but in and out of focus.

Like Dalton Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun, chunks of which he inserts without credit, Dhaenens wants to blame the Bigmouths for these innumerable deaths. He talks about young men giving up their lives to fight for values that they neither recognise or own. SmallWaR should be livid, but its form softens into the mournful dignity of remembrance ceremonies and its outrage melts into something like resignation.