Non-Fiction is a journal from Open City Documentary Festival. The publication was launched in 2020 with the aim to create a space for considered, critical and creative writing on non-fiction, featuring contributions offered in response to moving image, audio or cross-media, both contemporary and historical. The first two issues (#1 Power and #2 Network) were edited by Matt Turner and published in print form. In 2021, Non-Fiction moved online in order to be more widely accessible. We aim to publish two issues a year, each edited by a different guest editor.
Olivier Marboeuf and Ana Vaz’s proposal for their guest-edited issue of Non-Fiction is The Living Journal – a series of publications with a life span of three months beginning in October and fading in December 2021. The journal will count with contributions varying in form, length and language from artists, filmmakers, poets of the image and thinkers from the global South and North. With two new contributions published each week on Wednesdays, the journal thinks of its life span as a living tissue that is transformed by each new offering.
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian highlands inhabited by the ghosts buried by its modernist capital: Brasília. Originally from the cerrado and wonderer by choice, Ana has lived in the arid lands of central Brazil and southern Australia, in the mangroves of northern France and in the northeastern shores of the Atlantic. Composed as film-poems, her films walk alongside territories and events haunted by the ever-lasting impacts of internal and external forms of colonialism and their imprint on land, human and other than human forms of life. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of dehumanising the human, expanding its connections with forms of life — other than human or spectral. Consequences or expansion of her cinematography, her activities are also embodied in writing, critical pedagogy, installations and collective walks. Recent screenings of her work include: Berlinale Forum Expanded, Open City Documentary Festival, Indie Lisboa, MUBI, Arica Doc, MAM – São Paulo, IFFR, SESC Belenzinho – São Paulo, Tate Modern, Jeu de Paume, New York Film Festival.
Olivier Marboeuf is a writer, performer, independent curator and film producer. He founded the independent art centre Espace Khiasma, which he has been running from 2004 to 2018 in Les Lilas, on the outskirts of Paris. At Khiasma, he has developed a programme addressing minority representations through exhibitions, screenings, debates, performances and collaborative projects across the North-East of Paris. Interested in the different modalities of knowledge’s transmission, Olivier Marboeuf’s proposals broadly inscribe themselves in practices of conversation and speculative narratives. Read his recent texts on his blog Toujours Debout.
He currently produces films within Spectre productions, a company he founded in 2013 in Rennes (France). It is dedicated to new cinematographic writing and innovative audiovisual projects. The catalogue, which today consists of some fifty references, combines creative documentaries, feature films and short films, essays and artists’ films and is also identified for its exploration of postcolonial heritages and collective practices. Spectre’s films are regularly screened in international film festivals (Cannes, Berlinale, Viennale, Rotterdam, RIDM, Turin, Rome, Lisbon, New York Film Festival, BFI London film festival, Durban, Cinéma du Réel) but also in museums such as the Centre Pompidou, MOMA in New York or the Tate in London.
