Research

AHRC Techne funded PhD – Kingston University, London (2019-present)

Peripheral Visioning: Decolonial and Negotiated Authorship in Transcultural Film and Video Practices

The contemporary moving image projects discussed in this thesis take on the task of making visible and attempting to avoid repeating colonial, racist and extractive attitudes. How does this aim implicate both the makers and the mediators (writers, curators, spectators) of these works?

In this research project, I argue that modern and colonial approaches to vision and technological image-making as centralized, rational, objective and fixating can be unlearned through decolonial approaches linked to peripheral vision, which orients towards movement, opacity, decentralisation and depth. I demonstrate how a new turn in contemporary moving image practices combines transcultural co-creation and multi-sensory aesthetics. I suggest the term ‘peripheral visioning’ to describe their tactical strategies of reshaping the terms of collaboration and resisting hierarchical habits of seeing and showing. These tactical strategies involve negotiating different potential meanings of (co-)authorship, different models of acknowledging what is owed rather than owned by those involved in the process of image-making and storytelling, and different ways of distributing responsibility across time and space, as well as human and more-than-human ecologies. They question the ways notions of freedom and equality have become predicated on recognizable, commercialized and individualized forms of participation. Rather than the consumption of images as documents of a static reality, peripheral visioning promotes ongoing negotiations between perspectives that acknowledge radical cultural differences and ongoing historical inequalities.

The film and video artworks I discuss in this research project were created between 2010-2025 and connect to a history of precursors and parallel practices in the fields of visual anthropology, documentary film, indigenous media, relational aesthetics, institutional critique and sensory ethnography. However, these case studies share a distinct transcultural approach to criticality, sensory engagement and collaboration that involves decolonising and negotiating authorship and ownership at multiple levels of the production and dissemination process. In setting out similarities in their tactical strategies, despite being positioned in relation to different global and local contexts, cultures and urgencies, I also describe how they call for unlearning from the spectators, writers, producers, curators, festivals and museum institutions that engage with these works.

The moving image case studies discussed in this research each involve forms of working together that question the model of individual authorship and authority in documentary and artistic production. This happens through the relationship between two or more cultural perspectives. Some of the makers of these works are self-named as collectives, cooperatives or institutes (The Karrabing Film Collective, The West Java West Yorkshire Cooperative, the Institute of Human Activities), other works can be described less formally as projects of conversation, co-direction, or co-authorship (Stones Have Laws, Mangrove School, How to Tell a True Immigrant Story), or even as acts of deception (The Act of Killing, Spectres) or competition (A Presentation by Proxy), while still other makers frame themselves by referencing role-playing groups (Ana María Millán and Las Andariegas) or secret societies (The New Red Order). In the works that emerge from these forms of living and working together, some contributors are credited by name while others are tactically referred to by culturally specific titles and group designations or remain anonymous. My intention is to point to the porosity of roles that emerges when authority is disseminated in experimental ways.