Stefano Odorico

The Polyphonic Documentary project: relationality and extreme heat

This talk will present our thinking and some of the practical outcomes to date from the ‚Polyphonic Documentary‘ research project (www.polyphonicdocumentary.com), initiated by Judith Aston and Stefano Odorico in October 2020.
The project’s aim is to explore the potential of interactive documentary for promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange in a context of climate emergency and increasing polarization.
Our starting point has been to develop a working group of scholars and practitioners from within the i-docs community. We are currently working with over 80 people across several continents, with around thirty active participants at any one time.
We have been collectively exploring. tools, methods, and possibilities within the group, to help shift our own thinking and understanding. Our next step is to consider how these can be applied to wider interdisciplinary and community-based contexts.
Bringing together some of our participants, our talk will focus on our latest co-creative intervention around extreme heat and climate change. This intervention explores polyphonic approaches with a view to creating a replicable model that can be used in other contexts.
The project builds on the traditional experimental film form to explore new ways of approaching polyphonic, relational and transformative narratives that we believe are needed to sit alongside more dominant dramatic forms.
It also responds to the urgent need to co-create collective, non-anthropocentric and sustainable approaches to media practices and the future in general. This relates to the urgency of rethinking our engagement with the world through building our capacity for relational thinking.

Stefano Odorico, Technological University of the Shannon (TUS), Ireland is a lecturer, a curator and a filmmaker, currently lecturing at the Technological University of the Shannon (Ireland). He is the co-director of the International Research Centre for Interactive Storytelling (IRIS) and Visiting Research Fellow at Leeds Trinity University (UK). He has published numerous works on film and media theory and practice, documentary studies, and interactive documentaries. He is the co-organiser of the Interactive Media and Film Conference (IFM), co-editor of the Interactive Film and Media Journal, and a co-founder and member of the consultative board of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. He is currently collaborating with Judith Aston on a project focusing on polyphonic documentary theory and practice.