Women Minor Speculations

Monday, April 24, 2023
—
Curated by Jaclyn Quaresma
—
Work by Nicole Hewitt
—
Images Festival, Toronto
Co-presented by HotDocs
—
This program was presented online with closed captions

---

Filmmaker Nicole Hewitt explores the possibilities of documentarian language inside a fictional structure, examining the specificities of the cinematic and the relationship between representation and rhetoric, fiction and real-time. Women Minor Speculations is no exception. Here, Nicole attempts to rewrite a historical narrative, manipulating the levels of authority held in an image and trying to inscribe into each frame or sequence the possibility of yet another one.

Taking as its starting point the Neolithic figurines found throughout the Danube region—from Croatia to the Black Sea through Serbia, Romania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece—Women Minor Speculations is part road trip, part time travel, and part speculative fiction. It uses fragments of time, archaeological fragments, sound fragments, and imaginary audio files to weave a potential whole from many distinct parts.

During a period of four years, Nicole collected materials in lm, images, sounds, and text dealing with remains as evidential material, with landscapes as witnesses, with interwoven biographies of archaeologists, including their objects and subjects of research (the figurines, constellations, cement, gossip, and songs) in an exploration of how real and unreal objects of material culture produce gendered interpretations, collisions, and hallucinations of public accounts. Using the technologies of memory, data storage devices, Nicole fractures the official historical narrative through minor histories, minor narratives, and minor speculations. Shot on 35mm, 16mm, digital Bolex, Digital 8, mobile phone and still cameras, the lm involves a tentative encounter of two women explorers in Southeastern Europe separated by 6,000 years.

An original electronic soundtrack by the cinematographer and sound artist Ivan Slipcevic accompanies the lm. is audio was acquired from various sources, including field recordings, poetic fragments and fragments of speculative fiction collated from the archaeological record, as well as notations of everyday life in the locations Women Minor Speculations was filmed and the archaeological digs they took part in.

---

List of Works