A thousand and one voices
A thousand and one voices

Summary/Abstract: Below are some excerpts from the third chapter of my forthcoming book Image-Thinking: Art Making as Cultural Analysis. It will appear in 2022 with Edinburgh University Press. The fragments are samples of what I propose in that book: an integration of intellectual/academic and visual/creative activity, as an alternative to "artistic research". I traverse my own video work, along with other artists' work, to emphasize the point of image-making as an activity of thinking. In this chapter, the theoretical issue is "voice" in film. I engage the theory of "voicelessness" - of narrative without speaker, or narrator, proposed by American linguist and cultural analyst Ann Banfield. The film through which I discuss the issue was the first feature-length film I made, A Thousand and One Days. It is an encounter with migrants, foregrounding intercultural relations and their actuality for our contemporary culture. The selected excerpts discuss the question of the source - where does the narrative, the told version of events, come from? - and the responsibility that comes with it. This issue, prominent in narrative theory, is brought together with the documentary tradition and issues of linear story-telling, and the inevitable and productive multiplicity of voices encounters older narrative theories and literature (Proust).

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