Accepted Paper:

Radical documentary as critical action: experimental and expanded film practices as resistance  
Pablo MZ (Universidad Iberoamericana)

Paper short abstract:

This paper shares questions behind the production of films and transmedia projects created in the last decade by the author. They invite us to understand critical and experimental practice as intervention and reimagination of social crises and the horizons of possibility.

Paper long abstract:

During the last decade, I have dedicated my creative practice to expand the horizons of representation and intervention of reality through what can be labeled as experimental documentary art. These works include films, video and interactive installations, web documentaries and transmedia projects, as well as publication and pedagogical experiences. My approach is defined by a critical stance which I understand as inexorably linked to a determined critical scenario (any given social crisis) that the artist-researcher needs to intervene. This critical intervention is a form of resistance that defies the fractured state of affairs and proposes strategies to reimagine the horizons of representation and possibility.

Throughout the exploration of image and sound as vehicles for submerging in the fugitive realities that surround our shared experience, I propose an understanding of artistic practice both as a way of producing alternative knowledge about reality and a way of nurturing and intervening social memory. This conception of documentary practice builds on three main levels of incidence that this paper pretends to summarize: poetics of information, the archive as a critical event, and an eccentric pedagogy. Through these layers, the artist-researcher is capable of tracing maps of subversion of the current order of affairs, depositing in artistic creation the power of altering the architectures of meaning.

Panel P03
Existential crisis, exceptional fields: expanding fieldwork and storytelling in the face of violence and pandemic
  Session 1