Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses “speculative fictioning”, a practice research methodology for documentary film in order to situate it in a speculative future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper emerges from my recently submitted practice based PhD dissertation at CREAM (University of Westminster). In my presentation, I will discuss “speculative fictioning”, the methodology developed for making my thesis film, “A Terrible Beauty”. Following Donna Haraway’s open ended concept of ‘sf’, “speculative fictioning” facilitates documentary film to be situated outside its conventional timeframes of past and present, but in a future.

My film has largely been shot in Yiwu (China), the largest wholesale market for small commodities. These goods give shape to an archive of ordinary aspirations and futures, and the city stages an everyday arrangement of immanent futures that may have already arrived. “A Terrible Beauty” falls within the ambit of speculative research and combines practices of fictioning with observational documentary. That the present can be other than what it is, and the future ought to be other than what the present designates it to be requires a speculative sensibility that cuts across thought, action and creation. Speculation is therefore the truth of the future told “aslant”.

I ask how documentary practice speaks to such forms of future making, and explore whether a speculative approach may allow one to think of the latent potentiality of futures that lie outside the binary of the utopian/dystopian framework so that not only do we step into a time ahead, but also look at our time with a critical and yet more compassionate gaze.