Affirmative post-cinema

This collection gathers digital works that have a critical perspective on gender roles and relations of power. It includes audiovisual digital art/ works of extended cinema, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), locative narratives, gallery films or video art made digitally that have an affirmative approach to gender and spatial relations, one that refuses binaries as they imagine future possibilities.

This collection arised of the following project:

2018-2020, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (Individual Fellowships Call: H2020-MSCA-IF-2017): "AFFIRMATIVE: Affirmative Post-Cinema: Narrative and Aesthetic Responses to Gender and Power" (grant number 800259)

The goal of AFFIRMATIVE is to determine how post-cinematic arts counteract and aim to change current gender norms through affirmative narratives and aesthetics. By analysing post-cinematic critical engagements with issues of gender and power, I will examine how post-cinema reframes gender norms in an affirmative manner. Rather than being 'natural' or neutral, gender is a social construct inflected with layers of meaning, affect and power. Gender manifests as norms that are 'performed' and reiterated (mostly unconsciously and on a daily basis) through the ways we dress, interact and behave in different spaces and social environments. As attempts to shift the power imbalance between genders, feminist films, television series and social campaigns have often opposed the binary associations between gender and space (men/women, public/domestic). While feminist narratives are often created through negation and opposition, this project takes affirmative narratives and aesthetics as starting point.