Curating the exhibition 'Beyond Development: Local Visions of Global Poverty'. Some observations on documentary practice in relation to Poverty and its representation.

• Author: Ranfagni, Tommaso

Introduction

The chief objective of the exhibition Beyond Development: Local Visions of Global Poverty was to bring poverty into focus, exploring it from the perspectives of marginalised communities around the world and generating a space for problematising the creation and circulation of images related to poverty that had arisen within the project itself. As curator of the exhibition, my role presented multiple opportunities, as well as some challenges.

My task entailed identifying a suitable location for the exhibition, establishing the nature of the format as well as of the display and, given the availability of a budget, commissioning new artworks from a group of selected artists. On the other hand, since the exhibition had arisen in the context of an academic research project, I needed to provide a complementary visual experience to the Poverty Research Network, which could reinforce the cross-disciplinary dialogue on poverty that was central to the project's methodology. In this regard, I worked with Dr. McClure to 'mediate' between the academic and the curatorial perspectives intertwining in the exhibition. Our purpose was to identify correspondences between these two different domains in order to propose a format suitable to reproduce her approach and tackle the same themes that she has been engaging with over the previous two years. Dr. McClure's original approach is to use history as an instrument to put poverty in perspective and to retrace experiences that show how communities have sought to counter neoliberal economic policies. Given the centrality that archival and oral evidence play in her discussion about social inequalities, we agreed that the documentary, an artistic form that seeks to transmit knowledge about social realities through multiple sources, including documents and visual records, would serve as a suitable format to translate into the aesthetic language of Dr. McClure's mode of inquiry. Concerning the artists taking part in the exhibition, Dr. McClure has already met and engaged with a number of art practitioners with connections to the project throughout her travels across the countries involved in the network. All of the artists were already engaging within the areas of interest being addressed by the exhibition, and many of them were already using the form of the documentary in their creative practices.

Luna Maran and Keyti are two filmmakers with extensive experience in documentary-based projects, which they develop working with local communities both in Mexico and Senegal. Similarly, the Glasgow-based artist Stuart Platt produces work on themes of social justice that create opportunities for individuals and communities to put forward their own perspectives on their social realities. Nevertheless, as I discuss below, the documentary format entails the negotiation of a complex set of issues concerning the politics and ethics of representation and the aesthetics of poverty. In the following pages, I examine this topic in relation to the three films created for the exhibition. For that purpose, in the first part of my article I introduce the role of documentarism in contemporary art and discuss some of the relevant ideas about ethics and aesthetics implicit in this genre that practitioners and scholars have tackled over the past years. Such a critical account will enable me, in the second part, to establish a historical and theoretical framework that would serve to position and understand the three films.

Although the term 'documentary' is notorious for eluding precise definition (Nichols 2016), the term is used to denote artworks in both film and photography that involve techniques through which a director or an artist seeks to organise and transmit to their audience a particular social reality with which he or she is interacting. Driven by promoting education and social reform, the documentary derives its modern meaning from providing factual and authentic records of events and people. The documentary is thus considered as a kind of testimony that speaks 'truth,' in addition to being an art form. Although the documentary is often represented as a neutral form of representation, the educative process that dwells at the core of this genre relies on a hierarchical relationship in which the maker assumes an authoritative role over the viewer. For this reason, since the birth of this genre, critics have doubted the documentary representation and questioned its claims of truth. They have made clear that the documentary's account of truth is submitted to the creativity of the filmmaker, who manipulates facts through a subjective process of selection and association in order to go beyond the boundaries of direct observation, and who uses the emotional power of images for an often politically-oriented meaning (Rothman 1997: 4). The posture to serve as an open window on the world while, at the same time, serving as an apparatus to curate a truth that is inescapably partial turned documentary into the perfect instrument for spreading ideas and ideologies, either for or against a mainstream position. In that regard, the documentary form ended up being an exemplar arena for the dialogue between ethics and aesthetics in the art field.

Art has been a long-standing site of negotiation between ethics and aesthetics, and the political and the poetic, namely the relation between the formal language of an artwork and the political ideas it conveys to its viewers (Enwezor 2015); but such opposition becomes central in the documentary form whose techniques have often been repeatedly deployed by mainstream media in order to reaffirm dominant narratives and, therefore structures of power that support them. Over the course of the twentieth century, artists have been challenging particular conventions of the documentary as developed in film and photography in order to create innovative strategies that renegotiate the limits of representation and bring visibility to those who exist in globalisation's shadows. Already from the 1970s, artists including Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler were articulating ethical concerns about image-making within the documentary, pointing out the tendency toward the spectacularization...