Editing as a Research Tool, Performativity, and Displacement - Diana Toucedo
Across my research, I harness the performativity of editing – particularly through the essay form – as a means to activate footage. Editing, as a performative act, holds the potential to disrupt established conventions and produce a force that catalyses a shift in thought, language, and action, both on the level of the individual and the collective sensorium.
Drawing from Barbara Bolt’s notion of artistic research as a performative paradigm, I seek to use editing not as a mere tool for assembly, but as a means to “reconfigure conventions from within” rather than merely deconstruct them from the outside. In this sense, the process of editing becomes a dynamic, generative practice that not only questions but also reimagines the very conventions of film language, offering new ways of perceiving, understanding, and engaging with the world.
How have established documentary conventions reinforced particular epistemologies of power and representation? What alternative genealogies or methodologies challenge these conventions, particularly in relation to marginalised or silenced histories? How can one contribute to reimagining documentary’s potential for decolonial and emancipatory storytelling through editing and hybrid documentary?
In working towards my feature-length film Port Desire and the installation Editing as Research Tool, Performing Invisibility or the Ability to Reveal shown at NFA Research Weekend 2024, I aim to explore the interplay of editing, associative thinking, and performativity through several methodologies.
I will investigate editing as a research tool for artistic research, focusing on how montage fosters associative connections between elements, generating new meanings through it. I would like to work on editing gestures of displacement, juxtaposition, echoing, re-meaning, rewriting, notes and quotations. How does extracting images from their original contexts dismantle their intended narratives, enabling resignification and rewriting? This process questions the political and aesthetic implications of image recontextualization. I will explore editing as the creation of counter shots and off-screen spaces, and unseen perspectives that provoke a dialogical relationship with (in)visible imagery.
Other specific objectives:
- Investigating sensorial and essayistic documentary traditions that engage with themes of the sea, fishing industries, and extractive colonial practices in southern Latin America, specifically in Argentina and Chile. This will include examining the aesthetics and ethics of representing extractivism and colonial legacies in these contexts
- Identifying and tracing genealogies within documentary filmmaking that resonate with my practice, while interrogating the dominant traditions that have shaped the genre, expanding the scope of authors and filmmakers whose work intersects with feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist perspectives in cinema
- Creating an editing workshop
By intertwining searching and expansion of genealogies, the possibility of reimaging of history, and the performative potential of editing I aim to create a cinematic work that resonates with both the struggles of the past and the possibilities of the future, while giving voice to what has been historically erased or silenced.
This research is partially connected to my PhD dissertation, The Images That Resist Between the Future (working title) carried out at Pompeu Fabra University.
- Year
2024