Referencing Walter Mignolo’s concept of ‘border thinking’, this day-long symposium offers a place to discuss peripheral perspectives in film, art and media, and to contribute to what Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls a ‘re-centering’ of narratives. Building on FoR19’s aim to unsettle categories and divisions, this event reflects on filmmaking as part of a wider sphere of imaginative action and social experimentation. With presentations from speakers working across education, storytelling and fiction, interactive media, sociology, cultural studies and creative practice, the symposium aims to provide a space for dialogue and connective resistance.

Through two panel discussions, the event focuses on two central questions:

. In this contemporary moment of individualism, media sensationalism and disconnection, how can we develop collaborations that take a wider view of the ‘global’ and embrace local specificity? 

. How can we practice thinking, making and organising from a peripheral perspective, and support the idea that there are as many realities as there are relations? 

The first panel focuses on reframing collaborative production, taking into consideration experimental educational models, modes of activist storytelling, and filmmaking projects that work across cultural contexts. The second panel focuses on reframing interactions with materialities and environments, looking at examples of nature documentaries, virtual environments and video installations that reflect human and non-human interrelations.

 

Speakers include: Lecturer and video game designer Umran Ali; artist Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll; artist, geographer and curator Amy Cutler; lecturer and indigenous filmmaking researcher Charlotte Gleghorn; writer and activist Preti Taneja and sociologist Rolando Vázquez.

Symposium Schedule:

11:15 – 11:35: Introductions: Panel 1, Reframing Collaborative Production

11:35 – 12:00: Rolando Vázquez: Decoloniality, Recovering Learning as Freedom

12:00 – 12:25: Preti Taneja: Its daring is outrageous: Aesthetics as advocacy in We That Are Young and ‘other’ Shakespeares in translation

12:25 – 12:50: Charlotte Gleghorn: Dissensus/Consensus: Indigenous Collaborative Filmmaking from Latin America

12:50 – 13:20: Discussion and audience questions

13:20 – 14:20: Break

14:20 – 14:35: Introductions: Panel 2, Reframing Material and Environmental Interactions

14:35 – 15:00: Amy Cutler: Tactics for Nature Documentary

15:00 – 15:25: Umran Ali: Reframing Nature Through Video Games

15:25 - 15:50: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll: Cook’s New Clothes and Reflecting Relational Traces in the Desert Ice Factory

15:50 – 16:20: Discussion and audience questions

16:20 – 16:30: Closing remarks