Mieke Bal
Fiction as a Weapon
Abstract
Informations and abstract
Keywords: Activating Art, Emotional Capitalism, Anachronism, Imagination, Image-Thinking
After making experimental documentaries about timely political topics, I embarked on exploring how fiction can be made politically effective without focusing on specifically political topics. Through «thinking in film», I experimented, especially in the video installation project Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (2019) with possibilities of activating viewers, whom I call participants. Three chapters from Cervantes’ word-famous novel from 1605 (second part 1615) a gripping tale of slavery and escape, with clear autobiographical overtones, offered an especially effective opportunity to demonstrate through the aesthetic work, how a shift from activist to activating art can help us today deal with the problem of the deceptive term «“postµ-colonial».