The final six contributions to Ways of Organizing, from Rasha Salti, Marie Muracciole, Cíntia Gil, Ilona Jurkonytė, Greg de Cuir Jr., and Aily Nash, engage the following questionnaire that we shared with them, soliciting their response.
Alongside a recent expansion of documentary practices is the growth of film festivals as a prominent space for the engagement, circulation and development of nonfiction cinema. Premiere and specialized festivals, expanded sections and experimental non-fiction sidebars, thematic programs and the expansion into interactive and social media practices indicate ways that programmers develop documentary worlds, bringing previously separate cultural, political, and aesthetic forms into closer contact. Programmers also invigorate cultural and economic environments that have a formative role in the maintenance and development of new expectations around nonfiction practices. In asking the following questions, we want to step back from the content of documentary and investigate the contexts we make with them. Please comment on the prompt(s) that inform your approach to programming and their significance in relation to the potentials and pitfalls of expanding social and political spheres through and within documentary media.
The Sign of Art:
In what ways does your programming drive, accommodate, or challenge recent convergences of documentary with conceptual video and performance art practices?
Material Worlds:
What funding infrastructures actively shape the space in which you program? How?
Gatekeeping:
A surge in the volume of non-fiction media, from more traditional forms of feature length documentary cinema to various activist, ethnographic, and amateur video and immersive and experimental forms has offered programmers a formative position in the support and circulation of certain forms and community concerns over others. How do you respond to this role?
Developing Audiences:
Programmers are mediators between local, regional, and international content and the contexts in which they are screened. How does your role mediating the tensions between the content on screen and the contexts of the audience inform your approach to developing audiences?
Ecosystems:
What political, economic, aesthetic, or cultural arrangements do you see yourself facilitating or intervening on in your approach to programming, and on what terms?
Response Index:
Rasha Salti, Ways of Organizing: Against Convergence
Marie Muracciole, Ways of Organizing: Present Time
Cíntia Gil, Ways of Organizing: Passages
Ilona Jurkonytė, Ways of Organizing: Cinematic Public Space
Greg De Cuir Jr., Ways of Organizing: “What’s Good Is Not What’s Really Good”
