Studio Designer & Facilitator
Kim Montgomery
STUDIO PROMPT
How do we mediate place, historical events and our own memories as we bear witness to the changing conditions of the world?
QUOTE
“It is important to act as if bearing witness matters.”
DESCRIPTION
This studio revolves around the notion of bearing witness. It proposes a relationship between looking and memory where personal remembrance becomes understood as historical knowledge.
It will look at the way we represent, construct, remember and imagine the past as a mediation of place, identity and historical event. And how these often function as a ‘history’ of loss or injustice in the public sphere.
It explores the interconnectedness between media and advocacy and the role of documentary storytelling and imagery in visual representations of gender, conflict, protest, trauma, human rights, environmental change, refugee experience, migration stories, disappearing cultures etc
Through regular exercises we will be making work which investigates and preserves and bears witness. We will craft a moving image story into an exhibition as a series of documentary moments collected over the span of the semester.
In this studio we will capture moments and interview individuals who have born witness as an active moral engagement through a series of audio fragments, photographic images, social media platforms and video documentaries. We will look at the idea of collecting and preserving individual histories towards a more democratic history of the world. We will investigate how digitally enabled engagement has changed the witnessing practices of ordinary citizens. Whether it is about the idea of an eyewitness, a testimony from close proximity to an event, or the notion of immersive witness as a simulation of experience in 360degree VR they will all be representations of change which raise questions of truth, proof, and authenticity.
We will explore forms of witnessing practices through different documentary styles ranging from poetic to observational. Students might create stories of citizenship, surveillance, political advocacy, displacement, housing, identity politics, climate change, gentrification, contested sexuality, mobile population to name a few.
AIMS OF THE STUDIO
- To explore documentary practices as tools for testimony and historical witness.
- To experiment with a range of technologies and platforms including mobile phones, camcorders, internet and 360 degree filmmaking for expressing visual memories of personal knowledge as historical knowledge.
- To create work and develop and curate an exhibition around a theme.
Webmasters
Emma-Eve Haidar-Khalouf
Grace Purnamasari