Shades of invisibility
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Data
2021
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Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias
Resumo
Shades of Invisibility is an ongoing experimental artist’s documentation of my practice in making Chernobyl Journey, an activist
film that I have been working on for twelve years. In Chernobyl Journey live action tells the story of my four trips to the Chernobyl
Exclusion Zone between 2009 and 2015 in search of rare Przewalski Horses, while animation is used to subversively unravel this
apparently straightforward and chronological story backwards, tracing my fascination for the Exclusion Zone back to memories
of an acute and life-changing illness in my own timeline from May to August 1986. In the film, animation is used not only to portray my inner private world of sensations, emotions and memories, but also to trace the slow process of arriving at self-knowledge through unravelling invisibilities of a very external and political nature. However, it is not the animation itself that makes the
film experimental and subversive, but the way in which the animation is intimately woven into the live action footage. Through
methods of compositing and blending, a counter historical narrative is inscribed into the fabric and the forbidden spaces of the
two landscapes my auto-ethnographic story inhabits. As well as providing an outlet for my counter historical auto-ethnographic
story, Chernobyl Journey also debunks the myth that nature will spring back like a lightly trodden on blade of grass, even after
the worst excesses of human exploitation, extraction and environmental disaster. Shades of Invisibility is informed and inspired
by my reading of New Materialist texts, in particular Jane Bennett’s ‘Vibrant Matter’. In the text I attempt to explore the efficacy
of agencies other than my own will upon my art, using invisibility as a linking theme to create a network of interlocking pathways
into subject matter that is dense, multi-layered, interdisciplinary, complex and sometimes politically taboo. My approach to documentation is activist in itself, as it questions the hylomorphic and anthropocentric world view that underpins auteur theory. I
argue that this model of creativity based on the unrestrained and unaccountable power of the human individual’s will mirrors the
neo-liberal model of unrestrained extractive capitalism that is contributing so much to our present reality of climate crisis, loss
of species diversity and global injustice.
Keywords: Activist, Chernobyl, Invisibility, Vitalism, Animation.
Descrição
International Journal of Film and Media Arts : Vol. 6, nº 3: Special Issue (2021)
Palavras-chave
AUDIOVISUAL, ATIVISMO POLÍTICO, ANIMAÇÃO, CHERNOBYL, AUDIOVISUAL, POLITICAL ACTIVISM, ANIMATION, CHERNOBYL