Holly Antrum

My research facilitates the becoming of a narrator and a matrilineal counterpart, Markéta (b. Brno, 1976), via fiction into a different yet possible turn of family history. Through documenting the construction of her I overlay a fictional woman, reader and researcher, with the archives they attend today.

To arrive in the writing of a lens I adopt a feminist oral history research methodology, recording Markéta’s real-life peers, who were teenage girls during the Velvet Revolution. Her attention in the archive equally foregrounds the discourses captured by filmmaker, film theorist, and arguably ‘feminist collaborator’, Peter Wollen’s notebooks as generative, haptic kernels of film and cultural thinking as primary materials within the BFI National Film Archives.

Using these catalysts and tools of my practice (publishing handwriting, voice, interviews, filming, and an artist book that accompanies the spaces of Markéta’s research on Wollen, and her diverging interests), I uncover and present the speculative formation of subjectivity. Amplifying the ‘anglophonics’ in searching and reading the archive’s holdings in the 2020’s she troubles claims of objective truth in archive cataloguing. Taking the verb from Burrows and O’Sullivan’s book ‘fictioning’, the research accrues an incoming, assimilating perspective from outside of the imperial and the anlgophone world, so that the research also inherently displaces established contexts of Wollen scholarship - and therein tests an aspect of the British film theoretician’s reach in the 30+ years since the emergence of former Eastern-bloc countries into the West.

I use the docu-fiction genre to include the record of pivotal gender perspective on ‘peaceful’ change and new experiences through culture and identity-formation, brought into Markéta’s present-day EEA migrant experience within the cultural sphere working in Britain. Lending these perspectives to the becoming of a narrator, her voice, her work and her use of images within it, wagers the hierarchical obstacles of citizenship alongside supposed ‘pirate’ uses of archival material as quotation. Art-historical acts of copy, veracity, imitation and assimilation are crucial counterpoints here.

The legitimacy of these layered and highly disparate acts of looking and imagining subvert archive access, and the histories contained by them, to suture and propose the indexical value of Wollen, and examine the vehicle of artist moving image to work within ‘fictioning’.