GEM Lab's Works-in-Progress (WIP) Workshop Series presents:
“The Methodology of HOMING: Documentary Co-creation, Women, & Home”
Iphigénie Marcoux-Fortier, co-presented with Mance Dominique Champagne
//Wednesday Feb. 3, 2021
//5-6:30 PM
//Zoom event
HOMING is an act of documentary co-creation, of creating new connections—re-imagining the land and the people who inhabit it—, an act of re-making home and rewriting the future. This research-creation project explores the processes of documentary co-creation as a tool for valuing the plurality of knowledges of women from various backgrounds living in rural areas. Working with the concept of home, HOMING is inspired by a range of methods of inquiry and concepts, such as “digital storybridging” inspired from “video bridging” (Frise and Cizek 2009), “conversation” (Kovach 2009), “small places” (Zimmermann and De Michiel 2018) and “poetic inquiry” (Galvin and Prendergast 2016). These acts of co-creation, which are open, flexible, mobile and multiscalar (Zimmermann and De Michiel Auguiste et al. 2020) are grounded in an approach of “sensitive engagement” (Nash 2009). Emerging from these co-creative processes is a plurality of microhistories of women and ruralities. During my Master's degree, twenty-three microhistories of HOMING were co-created together with twenty-five rural women. Together we cultivate and co-create “spaces of home” in a time when we are witnessing waves of individualism, nationalism and othering wash across the world. HOMING goes beyond the act of storytelling (Juhasz and Lebow 2018), inasmuch as it uses documentary co-creation to generate new social configurations on a rural territory.
Iphigénie Marcoux-Fortier co-creates films anchored in the territory that raise questions of identity, highlight intercultural encounters, philosophies of life and, like a silent mantra, that listen to details. As a filmmaker-mentor, she has accompanied the creation of more than forty short films in indigenous contexts. In light of this background, Iphigénie conceives documentary filmmaking as a political and poetic process, as a flagship tool, and as a tool for bridge building.
Mance Dominique Champagne is one of the co-creators of HOMING.
About WIP:
The workshop series is meant to showcase new and developing projects by members of the Fine Arts graduate community (and special guests from beyond the faculty), creating a space for interdisciplinary critique and feedback. Encouraging the engagement of workshop participants, the emphasis is on research methodologies and future directions. We aim to create a space for alternative methodologies and practices, investigating research trends in the humanities such as visual anthropology, digital ethnography, field recording and sound experiments, approaches to information technologies, and other on the ground research practices. Workshops will be flexible and structured according to the necessities of the project. Workshop leaders are invited to pre-circulate reading materials and introduce multimedia aspects of their projects to accompany their presentations. However, other forms of workshop organization are welcome in order to fulfill the mandate of in-progress, emergent research.