Quinn Latimer, Basel Academy of Art and Design

Spring Semester 2023

My PhD project concerns the most recent turn to the “auto” prefix in contemporary literatures, moving-image, and visual art productions, and to related phenomena—of some self-same practice—that brings disparate fields and mediums into a new kind of spirited and localized relation. Indeed, concurrent with this turn to the autofictions, autotheories, and autoethnographies in which so many of our contemporary works of art take their form, there has been an equal turn toward fiction in social documentarian practices across mediums. How are these turns related, and what role does gender—its performances, avatars, hierarchies, oppressions, gains, losses, and entanglements—play within them? What movement are we recording or inventing? As the writer, filmmaker, and thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha once noted: “What is known as documentary may simply refer to an outside-in movement whereby one lets the world come to oneself with every move. And what is known as fiction may refer to an inside-out movement whereby one reaches out from the world to the inside. These two interdependent movements always overlap.” My PhD project, then, is a book that, on its surface, appears as a kind of autoethnography, both novel and script, and its narrator a kind of camera, relentlessly looking out—and also in. It is a record of movement and the movement: feminisms, authoritarianisms, environmentalisms, and other.