Dr. Patricia Zimmermann, Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies and Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, coedited a special dossier entitled "Co-creation Documentary During Pandemic and Protest" for Visible Evidence Forum.
The dossier can be accessed here: https://www.visibleevidence.org/category/forum/october-2021/
The dossier features 8 essays by theorists, practitioners, and programmers unpacking how co-creation practices were mobilized for teaching, producing, programming, protest, political actions, new theorizations, and critique during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The dossier includes essays by Angela Aguayo, Judith Aston, Reece Auguiste, Helen De Michiel, Ann Michel, Liz Miller, Dorit Naaman, and Patricia R. Zimmermann. Helen De Michiel, California College of the Arts, and Zimmermann served as co-editors of the project.
“This dossier on Co-creation Documentary proposes that we begin to think of documentary as a form of world-making,” notes Selmin Kara, coeditor of the Visible Evidence Forum.
“These short essays engage the crises that shape the current moment and their demands on representation. But they also argue for new collective, resourceful forms of imagination, speculation, and social interaction.”
The essays emerged from ongoing collaborative conversations held during the Co-creation in Documentary Convenings, a monthly international virtual gathering held on Zoom that commenced in July 2020 in response to the pandemic. The contributors served as convening design team and facilitators. The convenings are hosted by the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) and the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF).
“This exciting dossier on co-creation argues that the Covid pandemic and concurrent protests for racial, gender, environmental, and immigration justice have transformed how we work,” explains Joshua Malitsky, coeditor of the Visible Evidence Forum
“As these essays point out, these collaborative modes dismantle legacy strategies of auteurism and unleash desires for conviviality and cooperation in documentary.”
The Visible Evidence Forum provides an online dialogue for the documentary community with thoughtful short pieces on documentary and nonfiction media. Malitsky, Indiana University, and Kara, OCAD University, serve as coeditors.
The Visible Evidence Forum is designed to facilitate online dialogue generated from short, thoughtful, scholarly pieces on documentary media across the community of over 1,300 scholars, critics, and producers.
The Forum leverages the immediacy of online communications and the potential of digital media to combine multiple media forms. It encourages format flexibility and experimentation with new forms of online collaborative scholarship.
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