Documenting What? Auto‐Theory and Migratory Aesthetics

Abstract

As a method of learning more about contemporary culture than written documentation in libraries can provide, some 10 years ago I began to make documentary films. These films and what they showed me became, afterwards, secondary objects of analysis. Learning from and theorizing what I learned by reconsidering my own films yielded insights brought forth by the people “in” them. This became an ongoing, spiraling form of analysis-theory dialectic, and since my own films are the subject of my examination, I call it auto-theory. The best example is my video installation Nothing Is Missing (2006–2010). Here, 17 mothers of migrants, all living in different countries, explain in their own language what happened to their lives when one or more of their children decided to leave. These videos document a relationship, but not the one between maker and subject. The maker, here, is rather a facilitator, and the relationship that is documented, the one between the mother and someone close to her that has been modified by the migration of a child, is transformed in the process. The videos document this transformation itself, in the performance of it. This performative transformation is the subject of my article – it is what is being documented in the films.

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