In 2018, filmmaker Jules Rosskam and choreographer Cori Olinghouse formed a long-term research collaboration, Practices for Slow Encounters, as a way to braid together a constellation of mutual practices that take up notions of embodiment, cultural memory, and representation. Drawing from the fields of experimental documentary, performance, technology, oral history, and archiving, they carry out discrete experiments in a series of encounters.
“How do we look with the body, not at the body?” Through our evolving social practice called Practices for Slow Encounters, we apply deep listening, somatics and phenomenological approaches to expand what’s possible and legible in our respective fields of documentary filmmaking, performance, and archiving.
Outputs of our work may include an exhibition, video essays, a workshop, and living curriculum.
“I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.”
What we’re currently reading…
'There is No Such Thing as Documentary': An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://frieze.com/article/there-no-such-thing-documentary-interview-trinh-t-minh-ha
Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology orientations, objects, others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Amin, K., Musser, A. J., & Pérez, R. (2017). Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social. ASAP/Journal, 2(2), 227–239. doi: 10.1353/asa.2017.0031
Barker, J. M. (2009). The tactile eye: touch and the cinematic experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Butler, J. (2011). Giving an account of oneself. Vancouver: Crane Library at the University of British Columbia.
Cárdenas Micha, Blas, Z., & Schirmacher, W. (2012). The transreal political aesthetics of crossing realities. New York: Atropos Press.
Glissant Édouard. (2010). Poetics of relation. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
Høgel, A. K. (2018). Haptic Explorations of Archival Phantoms. Visual Anthropology, 31(4-5), 336–354. doi: 10.1080/08949468.2018.1497330
Marks, L. U. (2002). Touch: sensuous theory and multisensory media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Marks, L. U. (2007). The skin of the film intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.
Rajchman, J. (1988). Foucault’s Art of Seeing. October, 44, 88. doi: 10.2307/778976
Richmond, S. C. (2016). Cinemas bodily illusions: flying, floating, and hallucinating. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P.
Sobchack, V. C. (2010). Carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture. Berkeley: Univ. of California Pr.
Steinbock, E. (2019). Shimmering images: trans cinema, embodiment, and the aesthetics of change. Durham: Duke University Press.
Trinh, T. Minh-Ha. (1992). Framer framed. New York: Routledge.
Väliaho Pasi. (2010). Mapping the moving image: gesture, thought and cinema circa 1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Waugh, T. (2011). Beyond Vérité. The Right to Play Oneself, 93–154. doi: 10.5749/minnesota/9780816645862.003.0005
Xavier, I. (2009). Character Construction in Brazilian Documentary Films: Modern Cinema, Classical Narrative and Micro-Realism. Realism and the Audiovisual Media, 210–223. doi: 10.1057/9780230246973_15
studio experiments
over time this website will become a repository for our studio experiments, whereby we share what we’ve learned (and failures and successes) in an open-source and transparent way.