Inside the Distance
Affectivism and Activism
This presentation and paper will engage questions of advocacy related to NGO, activist, human rights i-docs. I will describe the development, structure and content of the interactive documentary Inside the Distance, which is the result of a two-year research collaboration with the Belgian Mediation Service Suggonome, Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC @ KULeuven), and STUK Kunstcentrum. Inside the Distance, documents victim/offender mediation in Belgium, where Restorative Justice is institutionalized within the criminal justice system. The project focuses on the subject positions of victim/offender/mediator (and the notion that those subject positions are fluid) and advocates for mediation as an alternative to dominant modes and theories of retributive justice and punishment.
Mediation is, in a very literal sense the object of study in Inside the Distance – but the idea of mediation is also a “boundary object” that helps me to grapple with questions of ethics and activism. In his “Affectivist Manifesto” Brian Holmes writes that “Activism has to confront real obstacles” but the role of an artwork lies in its potential to increase an understanding of the possibility of change through expression that “unleashes” affect. I have viewed my work in interactive documentary as a form of resistance, critique, opposition and activism. But I have long held in somewhat uncomfortable tension my position as a prison abolitionist with my sense of practical ethics – the question of how resistance in a pure, theoretical and political framework can improve the material realities of those who are oppressed by our criminal justices system now. A Mediation between affect and action helps me hold these competing desires – not in balance but in tandem. In this presentation I will analyze Inside the Distance as an example of both affectivist and activist practice – one that I hope will function as a boundary object that can mediate across conflicting and unequal relations of power and unstable subject positions.