Spectral Cinema and Contested Landscapes
A one-day symposium Friday 28th October 2022 at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK
“What role might ghosts have in the way traumatic histories are communicated and represented on screen? How might the ghost have the capacity to bring the past forwards to us in the present and enable us to reconsider how histories have been formed and by whom? How are strategies of haunting and the haunted useful to us when thinking through contested histories and contested landscapes? How can global, hybrid and alternative approaches to both documentary film and socially-engaged fiction encompass these ideas to critically re-evaluate society and our position within it?
These questions are at the forefront of a growing number of creative practitioners who are building on the work of sociologists Avery Gordon (Haunting and the Sociological Imagination), Grace Cho (Haunting the Korean Diaspora:Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War) and more recently cultural theorist Zuzanna Dziuban (The Spectral Turn:Jewish Ghosts in the Polish Post-Holocaust Imaginaire) to bring the notion of ghosts and haunting into socially and politically driven works that readdress and gently dismantle Western colonialist interpretations of knowledge formation, authority, supremacy and otherness. Further, contemporary practice in this field is differentiated from how we might have traditionally encountered the ghost in cinema to re-position the ghost within moving image practice as a political entity with agency and intention.
This symposium and its associated events will delve into this relatively recent branch of scholarship and will centre around practice-as-research. Spectral Cinema and Contested Landscapes is a hybrid project encompassing an academic symposium and a series of public-facing events in Farnham.”
Symposium organisers: Roz Mortimer, Abby Whittall, Simon Aeppli (UCA)
Keynote: ‘Stories of Animistic Cinema,’ Professor May Adadol Ingawanij (University of Westminster).
Artist’s presentations: Juanita Onzaga (Our Song to War); Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (Pirating Blackness).