Documentary Habitats

As record-breaking wildfires moved across eastern Canada and record rainfalls flooded Dubai; as billionaires offshored immense profits while so-called essential workers risked their lives during a pandemic; resources, knowledge, and even life itself are increasingly privatized—and disruptions have become the status quo to ensure as much.

Documentary Habitats argues that overlapping crises demand strategies for the long term rather than short-term technocratic pivots. They require local and Indigenous knowledge, derived from extended living with a place, rather than faith in techno-solutions designed to generate profit elsewhere. By redefining humans as one species of many in shared habitats rather than as an exceptional species with unchecked domain over the planet, authors Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann offer a powerful counterpart to understandings of documentary conceived almost exclusively as centered not only on humans, but on humans who exploit modern systems. Across eight categories of relationships—entanglements, polyphonies, contaminations, iterations, navigations, extractions, adaptations, and infections—Documentary Habitats follows documentary practices that are community oriented, dialogue-driven, place-based, and research-led, using augmented reality, interactive and mobile technologies, film and photography, and video installation.

Featuring works by artists and filmmakers from over 25 countries and drawing on two decades of curatorial collaborations, Documentary Habitats is a rallying cry to documentary studies to focus attention on environmental and social issues that may seem new and urgent to some people but are all too familiar to others.