MASHA GODOVANNAYA 

Queer Partisaning: Traces of Queer Relationality as Cinematic Errantry

Grounded in the filmwork produced within the context of the PhD-in-Practice study program of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, my dissertation project Queer Partisaning: Traces of Queer Relationality as Cinematic Errantry centers around the concept of queer relationality as an all-encompassing term that points to sites and diasporic social-aesthetic practices, quotidian acts, and mundane gestures of queer living, loving, and bonding, and as an alternative mode of being in the world. In the artistic inquiry, I propose framing experimental cinema as my technology of engroupment and as an aesthetically potent realm where queer relations can sprout, be practiced, visually experienced, and aesthetically traced through, with and as filmmaking, and through, with and as films. I see my inquiry – cinematic errantry through queer relationality – as a rhizomatic thought where qualitative social science research, refunctioned auto\ethnography, queer theory, and experimental cinema are intertwined and stitched – or rather montaged – together into a dense weave with and through methods of post-qualitative inquiry, decolonial and queer approaches that are, in turn, constitutive of my practice of queer partisaning. I argue that by relying on my proposed experimental filmmaking strategies (“queer partisaning”) and by inviting other-than-western subjects of queernesses to join me in this cinematic errantry, queer relationality could be generated through a collaborative ethical process of making an experimental film, through which this queer relationality could be dreamed of and made concrete, and, in turn, produced anew.