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UAL Research Online

Seeing in the Dark

Chesher, Andrew (2006) Seeing in the Dark. [Art/Design Item]

Type of Research: Art/Design Item
Creators: Chesher, Andrew
Description:

Seeing In The Dark is a 50 minute video commissioned by Healthlink Worldwide, that explores ‘advocacy for change’ through development and implementation of ‘dialogical documentary’ methods.

It was made in collaboration with visually and physically impaired young people in Gujurat, India while they devised and constructed an installation simulating their experience of the local environment. The video seeks to adapt the methodology of the development project itself — which is to enable disabled people to become advocates for themselves—‘advocacy for change’ — to the form of a film. Seeing In The Dark does this by building on my previous work, such as my documentary Changing the System, which places emphasis on the actions of the documentary subjects and their own interpretation of that action.

This concept of a ‘dialogical documentary’ has proved a powerful expansion of the means available to development agencies like Healthlink, through which the advocacy of the people they attempt to empower may extend beyond the immediate milieu they exist within.

Additional Information (Publicly available):

Current Research

In my own practice and in my work as a theorist I am interested in the variety and nature of different contexts that our practices generally take place within - our aesthetic, economic, domestic etc practices. I seek to address this primarily through paying attention to the dimension of social practice that Mikhail Bakhtin called 'dialogic'. This term designates the implicit tensions and affinities between different social groups - in their values, interests and ways of life, etc. - which animate actual encounters or dialogues between particular individuals.

In my theoretical and practical work I seek to foreground such tensions within 'enunciative' practices, i.e., those in which an artefact is presented to an audience within a certain context and is thus charged with a specific form of significance. Currently I am particularly interested in the relation between 'rehearsal' and 'performance'. I have been exploring this in a documentary about musicians' rehearsal processes, and in interviews with artists and other practitioners whose work that touches on this issue.

Publisher/Broadcaster/Company: Healthlink Worldwide
Your affiliations with UAL: Colleges > Chelsea College of Arts
Date: 1 September 2006
Copyright Holders: Andrew Chesher
Locations / Venues:
LocationFrom DateTo Date
Swaziland, Africa: Inclusive Communications for Disability (international conference)September 2006
Date Deposited: 07 Dec 2009 12:57
Last Modified: 04 Jun 2014 16:32
Item ID: 798
URI: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/798

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