Anaesthesia is an attempt to confront the numbness of our contemporary world—a state where images of violence, destruction, and suffering circulate endlessly, stripping us of the ability to truly feel. The book is a collection of screenshots taken from several internet videos—fragments of explosions, executions, wars, and cries for help ... sile🉐nt,🍃 grainy, ephemeral traces of an ongoing history of human pain. These images, usually consumed fleetingly and without reflection, are here given a weight they seldom receive.
The book unfolds in stark black and white, alternating between moments of blinding light and complete darkness. It mirrors the polarity of our existence—the spaces between empathy and apathy, between knowing and looking awꦓay. The layout is visceral—its pages bound with visible black stitches, each thread running across the spreads like the scars of the world it documents. The stitching doesn’t just hold the book together; it interrupts, disrupts, and leaves a presence, much like the images themselves.
This story was published as part of Outlook Magazine's 'War And Peace' issue, dated January 11, 2025. To read more stories from the Issue, click here.
At itsﷺ heart, Anaesthesia seeks to navigate the threshold between🌺 bearing witness and becoming desensitised. It does not guide or console but instead leaves the reader alone with these images. They are raw and unfiltered, deliberately stripped of context, forcing the viewer to contend with the stark reality of what they see without distraction.
The book opens with a prophetic whisper, foretelling a collapse, and moves through sequences that echo both the random chaos and structured brutality of violence. There are moments where the images feel unbearably intimate—shadows of people caught in terror, faces blurred in a final cry. Other times, the cold detachment of the medium—the pixelation of a digital screenshot, the familiar play button from a YouTube video—creates an unsettling distance.🧜 This tension between closeness and removal mirrors the way we consume these images in real life—fleetingly, through screens, and with a sense of separation that comforts us as much as it alienates.
Anaesthesia is as much about the images it conta🤪ins as it is about the act of looking. It asks what happens when we consume too much, when our empathy is exhausted and our senses dulled. The recurring black pages offer a moment to ꦓpause, a reminder of the void that such desensitisation creates in us. Each white page becomes a spotlight, illuminating fragments of horror that linger, even as we turn away.
The book is not just about violence; it’s about silence. The silence of the victims whose voices are lost, the silence of those who film, the silence we impose on ourselves as we scroll past. This silence is palpable in the images, and in the spaces between them—spaces that beg questꦕions we often fail to answer.
Ultimately, Anaesthesia is a reflection of our world today. It does not provide solutions or closure; it does not preach or accuse. It is instead an invitation to feel, to see, and perhaps, to awaken from the numbness. In its refusal to comfort, it challe𓃲nges the boundaries of what a photobook can ꦉbe, becoming not just an object to be consumed but a confrontation to be endured.
Text & Photographs by Valentina Abenavoli
An excerpt from Valentina Abenavoli’s Anaesthesia
WAR IS A MYTHICAL HAPPENING; those in the midst of it are removed to a mystical state of being: The love of war tells of a love of the gods. Where else in the human experience, except in the throes of ardor— that strange coupling of love with war—do we find ourselves transported to a mythical condition and the gods most real? Hence it follows, that man being a creature of God, formed with design and wis♌dom and endowed with sense and reason.
If the god is noth𒊎ing more nor less than the ꦜmassive violence that was expelled by the original act of generative humanity, then ritual sacrifice can indeed be said to offer Him portions of His own substance.
I will bring sudden terrors upon you—wasting diseases and burning fevers that will cause your eyes to fail and your life to ebb away. You will plant your crops in vain because your enemies will eat them. I will turn against you, and you will be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you, and 𝓀you will run even when no one is chasing you! Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free.
Now your statues are standing and pouring sweat. They shiver with dread. The black blood drips from the highest rooftops. They have seen the necessity of evil. Get out, get out of my sanctum and drown your spirits in woe. YOU ARE IN LOVE with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are💦 terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.?
This is the way the world e♌nds, Not with a ba𝔍ng but a whimper?
(This appeared in the print as 'Anaesthesia')
