| EPISODE 5: OPENINGS || A.2: NARRATIVE FIELDWORK |

Film Essay

Openings envisions a future in which crumpled, anti-aesthetic abstractions transcend their origins as countercultural expressions, emerging as the standard for elite interiors and political campaigns. These disorderely forms—once symbols of rebellion—now function as polished distractions, crafted to sedate and obscure the looming specter of environmental devastation. In this dystopian world, sleek, feel-good art is deployed as a veneer of sophistication, masking the collapse of ecological systems beneath the polished surfaces of cultural opulence. Through this visual language, Openings critiques the commodification of artistic expression, highlighting its role in the manipulation of public consciousness amidst systemic crisis.

Act

Act 2: Narrative Fieldwork | Agile Cinema® situates itself within the unstable terrain of cultural historiography, echoing Phil Graham’s reflection on the impossibility of fully capturing the present: “a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed.” In this spirit, Agile Cinema®’s interviews and micro-films operate as polyvocal, multi-channel, and time-based interventions—advertising campaigns in form, yet refusing the extractive logics of conventional media circulation. Rather than instrumentalize subjects for content, these works unfold through durational engagement—three months to a year of building trust, solidarity, and shared authorship with artists, curators, musicians, scholars, and cultural practitioners. The result is not reportage but relational media: slow, dialogic, and reflexive. At its best, the process becomes cathartic—an act of mutual recognition, wherein individuals are seen and heard on their own terms, yet reframed through the speculative lens of cinema. This practice stands in direct resistance to the hyper-accelerated economies of content production and consumption—what might be called the wham-bam churn of digital capitalism, which flattens attention, bodies, and meaning into disposable units of engagement. Against this backdrop, Narrative Fieldwork asserts the radical potential of slowness, presence, and co-authorship: a counter-cinematic gesture that insists on the dignity of process over product, and the irreducible complexity of human narrative over algorithmic simplicity.

Information

Double-Sided Collages | 4 x 4″ | 8 x 8" | 20 x 20" | 36 x 36"

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Bricolage

Collage, Montage, Assemblage

Vera Maurina Press