MX/BR/NC/NY
Trans*disciplinary artist and writer[...]
CV
Bio
Resume
document()o:
,ensayos
(rehearsals),
;
DOC 234—34/2
Contents
I. why this, why now?
I.I some theories of document(ary)/ as line /::/(cl)ear concept
I. II a chronologic recosider/re(l)ation
1.1 sovereignity
1.2 ideology
1.3 co-habitation
1.2 ideology
1.3 co-habitation
bibliography
Counter-Document: Rehearsals
Portuguese media scholars Andre Almeida and Heitor Alvelos write from the get-go of their interactive documentary (or i-doc) manifesto in 2010 that in the years preceding it, “the word "documentary" ha[d] been loosely used to describe multimedia pieces that incorporate video no matter its nature, technique, language or scope, taking advantage of the fuzzy and fragile boundaries of the documentary definition” and adopt Galloway’s et al. definition of considering “any documentary that uses interactivity as a core part of its delivery mechanism.” Eight years later, after the crystallization of the “i-doc” and the creeping advent of new technologies, Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard caution that “there lies a potential danger in the implicit claim that the futures of documentary media would lie exclusively in the technological future rather than in the exploration and inclusion of excluded and marginalized documentary media,” and argue for an advancement that “equally lie in the past as in the future. Cammaer et al.’s selection of essays emphasizes the theorization of what they perceived as marginalized documentary aesthetics in 2018 with the aid of scholarship from the 21st century, claiming such an effort to be situated in favor of decolonization—a word I suggest is used almost catachrestically. The editors cite Pooja Rangan’s earth-shattering insight, which pins the humanitarian impulse in documentary media as calumny and inseparable from the act of dehumanizing-via-victimizing its made-subjects, yet fails to address the very tiered mediation that is at play here. In 2022, Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton contended in “Interactive Documentary: Decolonizing Practice-Based Research” that “the i-doc becomes a space to explore and imagine collaboration dissociated from settler-mentality,” yet also follows the determinism of such mentality which demands “geographic and cultural diversity.” Both these attempts offer fewer potentialities and instead make evident how the continuum of colonial ontology and epistemology seeks to organize and narrate what is perceived as “new.” Nicholas Mirzoeff coined “visuality,” a process “formed by a set of relations combining information, imagination, and insight into a rendition of physical and psychic space,” which seeks “to present authority as self-evident.”
What is in question here is the role of the documentary artist in the act of documenting. For documentarists in what is called the 21st century, establishing “critical distance” in the act of “capturing,” whether a photograph, film, sound, or object (as in the case of the interactive documentary or i-doc, referring to compositions that are less concerned with medium specificity yet almost always find themselves in galleries and museums), fringes habituation. Such a distance has been questioned for decades in the Global South and the peripheries of the Global North and has become the chosen topic of exploration for the latest “documentary theory” in Western academic spaces such as “Critical Distance in Documentary Media,” and “Interactive Documentary: Decolonizing Practice-Based Research,” as shown above. What these editorial projects fail to address and continue to ignore is the generations of marginalized cultural agents have pushed for “documentary” work that implicates heterogeneity and its subjectivities, challenging hegemonic conventions in works produced in and outside dominant fields of knowledge production. Admittedly, the role of the documentary artist and the attendant practices, forms, subjects, and theories that have emerged from such a documentary “ontology” have been scrutinized in Western universities' media departments in the past decade. The discourses emerging from these spaces are concretized in Cammaer et al. and Ryan et al., where two main arguments are made. One concern is documentary media’s lack of self-actualization with other academic theories such as actor-network and object-oriented ontology. The other seeks a reconfiguration in the taxonomies of the practice and advocates for the i-doc, which is argued to be in a “privileged position as a sphere of decolonization.” Reluctant to subscribe to either determinism, I argue neither offers a material practice based on decolonization as praxis and instead insists on the myopically incessant search for the “new.” I further suggest a documentary practice that divorces from metaphoric representation yet does not recur to top-down pedagogy, instead opting for suggestive rehearsals with others.
Not abiding by historic conventions either, I look to practices that have never ceased to be and are alive in the past and present. With the establishment of precedent, suggestion, and praxis, I seek to undermine how global cultural hierarchies, added to the departmental blinders argued by Cammaer et al., and its admittedly belated efforts to account for ways of documenting outside of the camera, are part of a well-rehearsed dynamic where the core looks at peripheries to assimilate, transform, adapt and claim novelty. The place where “documentary” at the core finds itself is the same place of epistemic privilege perpetrating epistemic violence that continues to borrow from the marginalized—the Indigenous in this case— and seeks to manufacture affect outside of its non-dominant context while continuing to misuse, displace and turn resistance into metaphor. Cultural producers from the nation-estates of South America who found themselves in such a position of privilege forty to sixty years ago show the historiographic dissonance of the theories that have emerged to back the i-doc. Looking at these geopolitical exchanges in the Americas—from the “peripheries” to their “core,” or globalized centers of cultural and economic exchange, and vise-versa— and resisting the inclination from a Media Studies perspective to couple the work from Colectivo Los Ingrávidos and that from the compositions assembled by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, I will craft an invitation (although a limited one) that exemplifies how the future of a documentary practice, if any, is not a new one at all, but in Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s word, one that is tasked with “unlearning.” A call to return to the “initial refusal of dispossession and the world out of which it emerged.”
One could say that Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’ work checks almost all the boxes pertaining to the i-doc. Yet, how interactivity is brought into their work resembles less experiential and gallery films that rely on the viewer's disposition and more an enforced experiment of neurological reconfiguration. For the purposes of this zine, I will talk broadly about their practice as framed by their “Thesis on the Audiovisual,” a 77-contention manifesto that utters the material framework of their films and installations. I will add that their work is rhizomatic, sprouting with a mediatic cultural intervention that seeks “to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology” when treating the violence and impunities of the nation-state and its agents. With over 550 audiovisual pieces, the collective rehearses setting visuality into a trance through a methodology they call Shamanic Materialism. In this battle against visuality, “trance, the crisis or the aberration determines a constructivity that, intervened from the real, produces collective audiovisuals of the Missing People.” Considering the intimacy of death and History, Los Ingrávidos' work successfully tends to a sovereignty that refuses to withstand those offered by the nation-state, whether Mexico or the US.
Similarly, Lassalle-Morillo’s “En Parabola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part I)” negates easily digestible narratives not only about the Puerto Rican diaspora but also about documentary media and the artist’s role in this endeavor. Natalia’s practice could be defined as practice-based research. Yet, such a description wouldn’t contain the grafting of an affective citizenship, a sovereignty that invites the constellation of heterogeneous diasporic Puerto Ricans to:
”become what doesn’t exist”: a people that, while fragmented by catastrophe, maintain a potentiality for wholeness that can, ‘through ritual,’ be uncovered and reveal what she calls ‘continuance that is collectively conjured.’
Elisa Peebles's conceptualization of the piece, titled “Entre Esta Agua,” contributes to the reading of this piece and its decolonizing praxis. Lassalle-Morillo is less concerned with representing Puerto Ricans in New York City and more with retrieving “the intimacy disrupted by historical and colonial acts of violence” and offering an invitation to an “affective citizenship,” which “is the currency of Puerto Rican sovereignty.” The piece then responds less to the call for documentary media to be decolonized by approximating to relevant trending theory, nor via turning spectators into collaborators with site-specific interactivity, but instead grapples with the totality of colonial violence and asks how we can honor and retrieve worlds that were rendered impossible through imperial progress-driven determinisms?
Allowing cross-pollination from generations and struggles against coloniality, this zine is an effort that situates itself not in the position of a formulator nor organizer of knowledge but rather as a concerned documentary practitioner who is not willing to abide by the apologist and self-manufacturing theories of working with and in difference. Rather than asking for the theorization of representation in a colonial context for documentary media, I seek the help of cultural producers who grappled with a decolonizing praxis. This is not to say that representation is not an endeavor worth pursuing, but rather an invitation to embody a decolonization that tasks itself with the undoing of the mental acrobatics formed with the Portuguese expeditions to West Africa— the inflection point where the colonial metaphor of slavery was devised, and in turn “condition[ed] the positivism of land,”— the return of land to those Indigenous, and localized efforts to re-indigenize in collaboration and with the consent of those who stood in the land before us, and with those that have undergone forced displacement as a result of US imperial capitalism. In other words, what I instigate is a method of representation that is the effect of a return to the initial moment of refusal, a moment when sovereignty is pluralistic and heterogeneous, “a shared trait of cocitizens caring for a common world.” I propose that, as Lassalle-Morillo and Los Ingravidos show us, such endeavor requires ritualistic and actionable practices, or “rehearsals.” In a sense, this Zine becomes an invitation and a rehearsal itself.Statement Bibliography
Statement Bibliography
- Almeida, A., Alvelos, H. 2010. “An Interactive Documentary Manifesto” in Interactive Storytelling. Eds. Aylett, R. et al. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6432. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
- Cammaer, Gerda, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard, eds. 2018. Critical Distance in Documentary Media. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Ryan, Kathleen M., David Staton, and Tammy Rae Matthews, eds. 2022. Interactive Documentary: Decolonizing Practice-Based Research. New York, NY: Routledge.
- Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Cammaer et al. Ibid.
- Ryan et al. Ibid.
- Azoulay, Ariella. 2019. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 19.
- Colectivo Los Ingravidos. The Colectivo Los Ingrávidos Collection.” SAIC, Video Data Bank. https://www.vdb.org/colectivo-los-ingravidos/subcollections
- Colectivo Los Ingravidos. 2019. "Thesis in the Audiovisual." The Artist provided access in November 2024.
- Peebles, Elisa. 2024. Entre Esta Agua. “En Parabola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part I)” Exhibition Guide. New York, Amant.
Ibid.
- Garba, T. and Sorentino, S.-M. (2020), Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. Antipode, 52: 764-782.
- Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang. 2021. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Tabula Rasa 38: 61–111.
- Azoulay, Ariella. 2019. Unlearning Imperialism: Learning to Rewind in “Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism.” London: Verso, 39.
Zine Bibliography
- Garba, T. and Sorentino, S.-M. (2020), Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”. Antipode, 52: 764-782.
- Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang. 2021. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Tabula Rasa 38: 61–111.
- Azoulay, Ariella. 2019. Unlearning Imperialism: Learning to Rewind in “Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism.” London: Verso, 39.
- Cammaer, Gerda, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard, eds. 2018. Critical Distance in Documentary Media. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan; Ryan, Kathleen M., David Staton, and Tammy Rae Matthews, eds. 2022. Interactive Documentary: Decolonizing Practice-Based Research. New York, NY: Routledge; Rangan, Pooja. Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. Duke University Press, 2017.
- Giunta, Andrea. 2023. The Political Body: Stories on Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America. Translated by Jane Brodie. Oakland, California: University of California Press
- Azoulay, Ariella. 2019. Unlearning Imperialism: A Nonprogressive Study in “Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism.” London: Verso, 21.
- Hellion, Marth, Ed. 2003. Ulises Carrión : Mundos Personales O Estrategias Culturales? [Madrid, Spain], New York: Turner; Distributed by D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, 70.
- Giunta, Andrea. 2023. The Political Body: Stories on Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America. Translated by Jane Brodie. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 123.
- Peebles, Elisa. 2024. Entre Esta Agua. “En Parabola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part I)” Exhibition Guide. New York, Amant.
- Baumann, Stefanie. 2019. “Heterodox Mediations. Notes on Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 11 (1). doi:10.1080/20004214.2019.1633192.
- Giunta, Andrea. 2023. The Political Body: Stories on Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America. Translated by Jane Brodie. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 209.
- Escobar-López, Almudena; Colectivo los Ingrávidos. “Ancestralidad y trance.” Space 538: Gaile Pranckunaite (des) & Mindaugas Ūba (cod). https://ancestralidadytrance.space/; Colectivo Los Ingravidos. 2019. Thesis in the Audiovisual. Courtesy of the Artist.