(NOT) ENTERING EVERY ROOM

Exploring Autosociobiographies via liminal Crossing Points of social class and the emotion shame (2023)

(Not) Entering Every Room, conducted 2020/21 at Film Academy Vienna/ mdw – University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, set out to use the emotion shame as a focus to reveal and explore unconscious liminal crossing points in our biographies and perceptions of social class, building on our previous research on cinematic (auto)sociobiographies (2020). We are shaped, guided and scarred by our socialization and the society surrounding us. Each individual history brings with it a different knowledge repertoire about what belonging or not-belonging, „normal“ or „abnormal“ means. Spoerhase (Politik der Form 2017) describes the exploration and disclosure of one’s own biography in relation to social context & class, to one’s body, time & place of birth as “auto-sociobiographical”. He refers to the literary works of Annie Ernaux or Didier Eribon where individual life stories evoke a collective memory of a certain time and place, revealing liminal experiences of social class. One emotion that was mentioned more often than any other in these literary works, was shame. To explore our own histories of experiences and the attached knowledge repertoire, we used the methodology of collective (auto)sociobiographical exploration via a multi-layered artistic approach. Body work (Chechov, Shdanoff), writing improvisations and group explorations via zoom were used to probe the methodology of (auto)sociobiographical exploration in the light of shame and social class. Research on cinematic (auto)sociobiographies is still very new. We aim at contributing a method of exploration to the field of cinematic form and content production informed by artistic research methods.

A multi- and transdisciplinary research creation by Barbara Wolfram, Christina Wintersteiger, Negin Rezaie and Patrick Wolf conducted at Film Academy Vienna/ mdw – University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna in 2020/21.

Free Read: (NOT) ENTERING EVERY ROOM – Exploring autosociobiographies via liminal crossing points of social class and the emotion shame (published in Research Catalogue – an international Database for Artistic Research)