On Fictional Activism: Exploring The Film Trilogy Dissolution (2019)

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Williams Gamaker, Michelle. 2020. On Fictional Activism: Exploring The Film Trilogy Dissolution (2019). In: Katy Deepwell, ed. Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms. Amsterdam: Valiz, pp. 40-53. ISBN 9789492095725 [Book Section]

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This chapter explores my film trilogy Dissolution (2019), which includes the films House of Women (2017), The Fruit is There to be Eaten (2018) and The Eternal Return (2019) and my filmmaking methodology "Fictional Activism". Delving into politics of representation and race, which inform my art practice, the text offers alternative strategies to filmmaking to re-engage with the image-violence of imperial legacies in cinema and the moving image. This chapter forms the research base for developing an expanded artist’s monograph on Fictional Activism (2025), for which I have applied for major funding to research and produce.

‘Feminisms’ (as a plural) is widely used today to draw attention to inequalities and to critique the status quo in limiting women’s roles/ positions/ lives/ potential. Art can offer a vision of future worlds, manifesting a desire for projecting change, playing with existing realities and conventions. Feminist Art Artivism and Activism, two sides of the same coin, arise where art approaches, develops or transforms into activism and vice versa, where activisms become artivisms. In both, art emerges in differing forms of political intervention, at both an individual, shared or collective level, apparent in actions, events, identifications and practices.

This volume wants to reveal the diversity of these practices and realities. Representing a range of critical insights, perspectives and practices from artists, activists, curators, academics and writers, it explores and reflects on the enormous variety of feminist interventions in the field of contemporary art, social processes, the public sphere and politics. In doing so, Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms touches upon broader questions of cultural difference, history, class, economic position, ecology, politics, sexual orientation, and the ways in which these intersect.

This is the first volume in the new PLURAL series. The series focuses on how the intersections between identity, power, representation and emancipation, play out in the arts and in cultural practices. The volumes in this series aim to do justice to the plurality of voices, experiences and perspectives in society and in the arts and to address the history and present and future meaning of these positions and their interrelations. PLURAL brings together new and critical insights from artists, arts professionals, activists, cultural and social researchers, journalists and theorists.

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Book Section