ABOUT

THE HOME MOVIE 4.0: (co)creative strategies for a tacit, embodied and affective reading of the Sicilian Home Movie Archive

Aims and objectives:

My PhD project is born from the need to do ‘more’ than just give visibility to Sicilian home movies, representing a rich yet underexplored field of inquiry.
To this aim I develop a theoretical-practical approach that deploys imaginative and creative exercises to explore new ways of engaging with and looking at these films.
In my project I concretely address film analysis, ethnographic investigation and participatory practice as the three core areas in which creative exercises have the potential to make an impact.
The ultimate aim is to shift fixed habits and rigid frames of analysis that surround these films, in order to re-imagine the Sicilian home movie heritage as an archive of and for the future.
This website is a repository for both the project’s theoretical explorations as well as for the practice-led results.

Research questions:

Core research question: How can we design a Sicilian home movie archive of the present, that is reflective of the value of the material it preserves and at the same time stands closer to the communities through which these cultural assets are able to live on? 

Sub-questions:

  1. How does creativity and artistic intervention influence and shape our experience of the Sicilian archive?
  2. How is arts practice able to transform theoretical frames of analysis of the home movie and to which new modalities of looking at the Sicilian home movie archive do they give rise to?
    1. How can we expand our visual analysis capacity in relation to these films, by tapping into formal and textual qualities of creative methods?
    2. What role does our body play in a reading of the Sicilian home movie that highlights the felt and sensuous nature of these films?
    3. What forms of collective knowledge can we orchestrate, that can offer new perceptual forms and uses of these films?
  3. How can we orchestrate these reading modalities in a way that reflects the fluidity, interactivity and open-endedness of the archive?