Queer Partisaning: Traces of Queer Relationality as Cinematic Errantry

Abstract

Grounded in the filmwork produced within the context of the PhD-in-Practice study program of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, my dissertation project Queer Partisaning: Traces of Queer Relationality as Cinematic Errantry centers around the concept of queer relationality as an all-encompassing term that points to sites and diasporic social-aesthetic practices, quotidian acts, and mundane gestures of queer living, loving, and bonding, and as an alternative mode of being in the world. In the artistic inquiry, I propose framing experimental cinema as my technology of engroupment and as an aesthetically potent realm where queer relations can sprout, be practiced, visually experienced, and aesthetically traced through, with and as filmmaking, and through, with and as films. I see my inquiry – cinematic errantry through queer relationality – as a rhizomatic thought where qualitative social science research, refunctioned auto\ethnography, queer theory, and experimental cinema are intertwined and stitched – or rather montaged – together into a dense weave with and through methods of post-qualitative inquiry, decolonial and queer approaches that are, in turn, constitutive of my practice of queer partisaning. I argue that by relying on my proposed experimental filmmaking strategies (“queer partisaning”) and by inviting other-than-western subjects of queernesses to join me in this cinematic errantry, queer relationality could be generated through a collaborative ethical process of making an experimental film, through which this queer relationality could be dreamed of and made concrete, and, in turn, produced anew.

Short biography

Masha Godovannaya (born 1976, Moscow, USSR/Russia) is an experimental filmmaker, queer-feminist researcher, curator, and educator. Approaching art production as artistic research and collective action, Masha’s artistic and scholarly practices draw on combinations of approaches and spheres such as moving image theory, experimental cinema, and DIY video tradition, social science, post-soviet/postsocialists studies, queer theory, and decolonial methodologies.
Masha holds an MFA degree in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, USA, and an MA degree in Sociology from European University in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Masha’s films and visual works have been shown at festivals and art venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, BFI London Film Festival, Ann Arbor International Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Vienna Shorts Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Manifesta 10, 7th Liverpool Biennial, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, The Ludwig Museum at the Russian Museum, and others.
Masha’s works are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), The Collectif Jeune Cinéma (Paris), Filmmakers’ Cooperative (New York), and The CYLAND Video Archive (New York). These works are included in the collections of The State Russian Museum, (St. Petersburg), Österreichisches Filmmuseum (Vienna), and Anthology Film Archives (New York).