Critical and Collective Fabulation: Ways of Being and Worlding

Fabulations are processual, emergent imaginaries. They are narratives that unfold and reweave. Collective fabulation, in terms of this practice research, is conducted as knowledge in action. It is a method of ontological practice through myriad tactical and improvisational ways of being, relating and becoming with the world. Co-creative acts interrogate and propose ways to redress the distances that can separate us from ourselves and others, from the land and ancestors, and from our collective and liberatory efforts for transformation. My methodological approach and practice for collective fabulation is transdisciplinary praxis: it centers cinema, sensory ethnography, reflection and reflexivity with transdisciplinarity. Filmmaking is inherently an embodied, emplaced, and collaborative transdisciplinary practice. Sensory ethnography affords ways to participate with people, things and situations beyond the limits of written or spoken languages. This practice research aims to experiment with ways for drawing with the camera, breaking from the fixity of the frame, the totality of documenting. The acts of drawing can productively confuse subject/object relationships–what is being drawn, to be drawn in, drawn with, or withheld. Fabulation explores the intricate interplay of futures remembered and imagined, experienced and made.

This research develops the notion of ghosts (drawing on the work of Avery Gordon) and explores haunting as expressions of agents desiring to appear, demanding attention and longing for transformation (Gordon 2011). Ghost images might also provide ways of seeing and being within nonlinear time and through both discursive and non-discursive forms of exchange. Haunting invites the speculation of possibilities while rooted in the present and referencing the past. Ghosts serve to synthesize moments of crisis, or Krisis – the Greek etymology of crisis defined as extreme opportunity. The notion of captivity (drawing on the work of Susan Lepselter) is related and intertwined with the dynamics of haunting. Susan Lepselter discusses trauma in terms of immobility–the feelings that arise from the “conflict between ‘They’re doing things to me,’ and ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’” This research asks: How are narratives of captivity persistently haunting the imaginaries of Indigenous, settler-colonial and non-indigenous peoples through the legacy of colonial violence as well as ongoing coloniality?

This research argues that restorative justice and responsible action demand new forms of legibility, expression and exchange, and questions the role of artifacts generated through co-creative expressions in regard to the ways these might engage and expand the capacities of curatorial approaches and the function and understanding of archives. The use of images, as Azoulay and others have shown, can both erase and illuminate the complexity of personhood and the way this is shaped by larger and systemic forces. How might narrative artifacts serve to activate conditions for responsible actions through their creation and circulation, as was the promise of Third Cinema, within discursive and nondiscursive exchanges for serving responsible action? Historical narratives of captivity have entrenched and conditioned particular perspectives for Indigenous and settler-colonial peoples alike. These perspectives often require that those harmed are solely defined through pain, suffering, and oppression they have experienced (Belcourt 2020). Yet, images and narratives can also contribute in powerful ways that redress the harm of the colonial archive and resist an imperialist framing of history, as Azoulay proposes, through approaches for potential history, “a form of being with others, both living and dead, across time, against the separation of the past from the present, colonized peoples from their worlds and possessions, and history from politics,” (Azoulay 2019, p.60).

This research engages collaborators and comrades including Vaporia Collective (with members John A. Bruce, Erin Dixon, Hala Abdel Malak, and others), Reconciliation Canada, Transdisciplinary Design MFA at The New School / Parsons School of Design, and others.

references

Azoulay, A. (2019) Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Verso.

Belcourt, B. (2020) A History of My Brief Body, Columbus, Ohio: Two-dollar Radio.

Gordon, A. (2011) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lepselter, S. (2016) The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Raffo, S. (2022) Liberated to the Bone: Histories, bodies, futures, Chico, CA: AK Press.