Research Statement

Research Questions

The Futorical Society is part of my ongoing investigation around site-based documentary work, practices of listening, speculative nonfiction and historiography.

I began this project with a research question prompted Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986). In this short and playful story, Le Guin uses the analogy of a ‘carrier bag’ to argue for the kinds of stories less about heroic domination, than of co-operation, or in other words, of ‘benevolent spaces’. How then might documentary be such a space to hold multiple histories and imagined futures? 

Le Guin’s narrative theory reminds us of how films might function as Tsing’s idea of ‘open ended’ or ‘polyphonic’ assemblages (2015) and as sites for multiple voices to co-exist. These assemblages also call to mind Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopias’ as spaces that are multiple and simultaneous. Here, Foucault identifies a number of sites that he calls heterotopias - gardens, libraries and museums, for example. These spaces are ‘thoroughly loaded with qualities and perhaps also haunted by fantasy’ (2008, p. 16). The notion of fantasy is particularly relevant to the stories that Australia tells itself, and those that get perpetuated through institutions like historical societies, monuments and other signifies of a colonial past. This is especially pertinent considering the recent failure of the referendum designed to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people constitutional recognition and a ‘Voice’ to parliament to advise on issues affecting their communities. The failure for Australia to acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation and inter-generational trauma of dispossession, slavery, stolen children, and racism enables the continued fantasy that we are ‘one’ nation and ‘one’ people. This is reinforced by the myth of the ‘fair go’ in Australia, a belief that continues in many parts of the country. 

Foucault asks how we can describe heterotopias and what meanings do they have (2008, p. 17). I am interested in how film can not only describe such spaces but also create them. And how formal filmmaking strategies can be used to create heterotopias so as to juxtapose familiar spaces and objects in ways that are uncanny in the Freudian sense of being familiar and yet strange? And in doing so, invite reflection on how these heterotopic (or heterotopian) spaces reveal latent histories and stories in this particular site of my investigation.  Here, I claim that film can do this work in non-didactic ways by creating new temporal relationships through the use of heterogeneous material and temporalities. 

The research questions the film engages in draw on philosophical questions about how settler-colonial Australia can reckon with other histories through a variety of audiovisual and rhetorical approaches. They employ Le Guin’s idea of the carrier bag alongside Foucault’s heterotopias - both concepts that are concerned with spatial organisation. They also address questions of what a speculative practice of documentary might look and sound like. These questions have implications for documentary that employ less story-driven and indexical means of representing contested and complex histories. 

Context

The context from which The Futorical Society (and the woman who killed the weeds) emerged was a two-week artist-in-residence program in a small town in the wheatbelt of regional Victoria. I had initially proposed the creation of a series of short films focused around an ephemeral ‘crowd-sourced’ museum of curious objects. To engage with local residents, I would run workshops where participants would bring in objects that could collectively imagine a future archive. These objects I would scan and create 3D artefacts to be animated against the backdrop of found landscapes. While this proposal functioned as the starting point for the project, my documentary making methods over the period of the residency were informed by my interests in listening, socially engaged and site-based art practices, formal experimentation, and speculative nonfiction.

Over the past few years, a range of documentaries have emerged that explore stories and experiences grounded in a site-based approach. Such films include Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies of Solitude (2022), Hannah Jayanti’s Truth or Consequences (2020) and Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and The Hottest August (2019); all of which de-emphasise the singular linear narrative in favour of an exploration of the entanglements of place, people, and ecologies. These films resonate with my hybrid documentary film-installation practice where I spend extended periods of time within the selected locations observing temporal and narrative movements among the human and other-than-human beings in what Tsing calls ‘open ended assemblages of entangled ways of life’ (2015, p. viii). While my works are often edited into linear films, I would also argue that they function as assemblages informed by underlying research interests in non-linear forms which destabilise story as the primary ‘organizing principle’ (Juhasz and Lebow 2018). While The Futorical Society did have have a story that became the spine, the primacy of story was de-emphasised through the incorporation of other vignettes, objects, reflections and meditations on place and the people who shape them.

What became clear in the first few days of the residency was the dominance of the settler-colonial narratives that defined the small towns in the region, fortified through interpretive signage, historical societies and tales of almost mythological status. This piqued my ongoing interest in the speculative potential of documentary and how it might both tell different kinds of stories about this region, as well as anticipate alternative possibilities and futures. For Salazar, this is framed through an idea of the ‘creative treatment of possibility and potentiality, not just actuality’ (2017, p. 154) with documentary practices that speculate on the future and perform the imaginable. The idea of speculation, future imagining and documentary may seem at odds, even venturing into the territory of cognitive dissonance. How might we imagine futures and pasts through documentary, without relying on devices such as re-enactments? By using audio visual strategies such as photogrammetry and animation, these can be collaged to and create new worlds or heterotopias (Foucault, 2008, 2008). This can counter what Bellinick and Van Dienderen have called ‘taxidermic, image positivist mainstreams’ (2019, p. 60) that history-based documentary is often so reliant on. These strategies can thus enable makers, participants, and audiences to engage in the politics of ‘what if’. 

Methods 

The Futorical Society is primarily a documentary film that uses a range of formal strategies, and more poetic and experimental ones. Throughout the film, the story of Hungarian refugee and scientist, Vera Molnar is recounted through interviews with two people who knew her. One by way of her agricultural science work, and the other through her work with refugee charities. As a single woman moving to a small town by herself, Vera becomes the antihero. Her character is fleshed out through anecdotes that demonstrate the important work she did, and also her eccentricities. Woven throughout the rest of the film are fragments of stories, experiences, objects and natural history - each of which come in and out of focus through using sound and filming techniques. 

I also use material generated through the workshops I held - one in Hopetoun and the other in Warracknabeal. In these, local residents brought along personal and curious objects. I used photogrammetry to capture these from multiple angles in order to create a 3D representation. These objects ranged from ones that reflected their familial histories on the land, to ones that could speculate on an imagined future of the town; and from home-made foods to a piece of bark to remind us of what Country we are on, and its Indigenous past. I also asked each participant to speak about the object and recorded their voices. 

During my residency, I also spent time walking around the town and scanning the outsides and insides of buildings, shops and community spaces using the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scanning capability of an iPad. I also scanned the Eucalyptus trees along the river. Using the open-access Blender 3D animation software, I created heterotopian assemblages of the built environment facades, interiors, community garden and objects from the second-hand shops that line the streets of Warracknabeal. These are not glossy and seamless constructions, but ones that reveal their flaws through holes in the surface (or meshes). Objects appear in unlikely juxtaposition: a ghetto blaster turns up in the garden; a row of ceramic objects appear as the same size as a shop front; and finally, trees grow through the floor of the Ladies Rest Rooms in a rewilding of these civic spaces. I also use sequences of ants and the local Malleefowl, finding parallels in the precious objects on display at the Warracknabeal Historical Society. 

The range of approaches and material allows temporal shifts between past, present, and future, enabling the viewer to speculate on the unseen (and often unacknowledged) histories of this region as well as the possible futures as we hurtle towards climate collapse. 

Outcomes

How does film do philosophy, rather than speak about it? The Futorical Society explores how notions of the speculative can be embedded in the form, thereby subtly challenging how place is constructed through the stories it tells itself. 

The film is also a work that responds to, and incorporates the voices of a local community while also presenting novel audio and visual approaches to the representation of histories. Although presented in a linear form, it can also be understood as series of vignettes that propose alternate ways of understanding place through scale, time, myth, and personal anecdote

Impact

The film has been shown at the Warracknabeal Town Hall, where the film is based. Local community members came to the screening and were moved by the representation of both the people and the local area. The film has the capacity to both address research questions about representation, while be engaging for a non-academic and art-literate audience.

The film was also screened at the Sightlines: Filmmaking in the Academy conference Adelaide, Australia in 2023.

References

Bellinck, T. and van Dienderen, A. (2019) ‘“That’s My Life Jacket!” Speculative Documentary as a Counter Strategy to Documentary Taxidermy’. Critical Arts, 33:1, pp. 60-74.

Foucault, M. (2008) ‘Of other Spaces (1967)’. In: Dehaene, M., & De, C. L. eds, Heterotopia and the city: Public space in a postcivil society. Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 13-30.

Juhasz, A. and Lebow, A. (2018). ‘Beyond Story: an Online, Community-Based Manifesto’. World Records, 2 (3). 

Le Guin, U. K. (2019) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ingot Books.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Salazar, J. F., Pink, S., Irving, A. and Sjöberg, J. (2017). Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds. London: Taylor & Francis Group.

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response to what follows:

Review 1: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

This is a very well-crafted and considered piece of practice-based research that explores relationships between oral histories, object focused memories, place and ecology within the context of Hopetoun. Importantly the work also pushes us to consider our expectations and limitations as audiences when viewing non-linear documentary-based works. 

The evolution of the project, as highlighted in the written work, speaks to the multiple elements, and approaches the author has used in the edit. Finding ways to have the collected objects, town 3D modelling, on screen text, visual archival material and oral testimony all speak to each other in the film was a challenge clearly really well embraced by the author. The editing decisions spoke very clearly to the research focus and the exploration of how, or if, a single film can explore both multiple histories and imagined futures simultaneously. And the impact of a fragmentation of testimony and images on this. Which are all important questions that many documentary practitioners and filmmaking academics should appreciate the project aiming to tackle.

While at times the film is asking quite a lot of a small screen audience, even ‘art-literate’ audiences, as the written work highlights it was targeted towards. However, this potentially hinted at the real strengths of the work being best communicated within a more hybrid documentary-exhibition format, in the location itself, as described in the written work. Clearly the research aims were related to the single documentary film format, however viewed, however quite how the demands placed on a general audience would impact the piece’s ability to convey of the key themes will be something for the author to try and explore on release. From my own viewing, the chosen approach did mean the work offered up new moments of insight and interest with multiple viewings, so I encourage viewers to take the time to watch this more than once.

The written work contributes valuable academic context and provides important insight into the thinking and context of its development, with the research questions being well articulated. Importantly, the practice also stands alone well, and while for academic audiences viewing and reading the work together is recommended, the confident interrogation of story disruption techniques still brings these underpinning practice research questions into an film viewing audience’s purview. These elements of the project will of course speak to a specific audience, so understanding its impact within the local community, including participants, and those from related contexts, would be one element to explore on release, and offer a more complete picture of the research. Overall, I have no issue in recommending the work is published as is.

Review 2: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

The Futorical Society is a complex and enchanting piece of community engaged non-fiction filmmaking. It is an innovative piece of film as practice research in multiple aspects of its approach. The narrative structure develops in waves, slowly immersing the viewer in fragments of place and glimpses of history. This creates understanding of the creation of a history of Warracknabeal and Hopetoun as multi-faceted, heterogeneous, and partial. This understanding of histories of place is relevant to all places.

The collage of voices builds to produce multiplicities of encounter. Instead of each contributing to a single narrative they weave together to develop a place that involves many. In the imagery we see no one. The eerily empty of people shop fronts are boarded or papered up. They are thin extrusions in the 3D space. Behind them and within them grow eucalyptus trees.

There are many innovative uses of time in the piece. The solidified time of the photogrammetry making places into objects of unknown scale, the accelerated time of the time-lapse flowers. The combination of techniques unsettles the concept of time as unfolding. Instead, the film draws this viewer into a engagement with the place and it’s partially grasped stories. Incomplete and the therefor open to future weaving. 

The accompanying written statement explains the open-ended approach to constructing the non-fiction film. This is apparent in the piece that is structured around clearly delineated movements. Each chapter is introduced by photochemical stop motion footage. The reprise to this imagery is accompanied by narrative glimpses into description. The voices describe personal experiences of encounters with visiting horticultural scientist, Vara Molnar. This story of Vera is also deliberately incomplete. It shows how the multiple voices of the community come together to describe aspects of an individual.

Overall, the combination of the various filmmaking techniques are brought together dextrously to produce a cohesive film. The film could be understood as exploring film as philosophy in various ways. I would like to read more about how the maker understands their work as doing a species of speculative philosophy in their multi-agency film praxis.

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response.