Fictioning the Landscape

In this brief article, I want to look at a particular form of what David Burrows and I call fictioning when this names, in part, the deliberate imbrication of an apparent reality with other narratives. The form I have in mind is what has become known as the film-essay, or what Stewart Home calls, in his foreword to the third of my examples below, the ‘docufiction’ (Home 2011: 3). The latter operates on a porous border between fact and fiction, but also, in the particular articulation I am concerned with, between fiction and theory and, at times, the personal and political. It is an increasingly popular genre in contemporary art practice. In what follows, I will be especially concerned with how the docufiction can involve a presentation of landscape, broadly construed, alongside the instantiation of a complex and layered temporality which itself involves the foregrounding of different pasts and possible futures. Fictioning also refers to the way in which these other space-times need to be performed in some way, for example with a journey through or to some other place as in a pilgrimage.