RAFAL MORUSIEWICZ 

Remixing Polish film history: Self-contaminations, queer interventions, and affective conjurings

My “PhD in Practice” project focuses on Polish film in 1952-1989. Its title points to my intention of conducting an artistic research practice through creating mash-ups, through critical fabulation, through multiple layering and repeating themes, genres, sounds, images, and contexts I would find both in film and my affective memory about it.

My central central research interest revolves around questions such as: What are the potentialities of rearranging and juxtaposing elements of multiple received accounts (film, text), of adding onto them accounts that were originally silenced, dominated, or erased? What are the implications and responsibilities of doing artistic research by “contaminating” the received accounts through affective reception, essay-based auto-ethnography, and speculations on might-have-been’s? How does the “mixtape” editing method I adopt in my film practice enable the above intention? The above questions revolve around the following research concerns: 1) the potential role of auto-ethnography as a contaminator multiple axes between the author-researcher-artist and the research area (delineated not only by the specific time- and place-based moving image practices but also by the selected artistic and academic research methods), 2) the potentiality of challenging and expanding research-based writing formats, pertaining to trans-disciplinary social sciences, humanities, and artistic research, 3) the interplays between the diegetic and non-diegetic narratives and contexts demonstrated, both explicitly and implicitly, in the selected film practices, 4) the possibility of challenging, contaminating, or, in other words, queering the dominating white, heteronormative, and cis-male foci in the selected film practices, and 5) the role of my own affective history of applying multiple readings to the selected film practices, including the unreliability and transience of my memory, sustained by diegetic and non-diegetic affect.

My research interests concern the different modes of resistance and assimilation within Polish LGBT activism, intermediality in the context of “queer theory,” and the visibility of non-heteronormative elements within Polish cinema, video art, and experimental film.

Since 2005, I have been teaching courses on academic writing, as well as on Anglo-American film, TV, performative arts, and video art, at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. I have authored several publications that have, in recent years, increasingly focused on film analysis in the context of queer theory, rogue theory, and freak theory. In pursuing my doctoral studies, I have participated in several conferences, most recently “Revolting Peripheries” at the University of Bielsko-Biała, “Figurations of Intermediality in Film” at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania and “Bodies in Between” at Babes-Bolyai University.