Workshop: Is Co-authorship a Luxury in a Time of Fascism: Making films on nothing to navigate the economies of leisure, pleasure and urgency in sex work, political organizing and collaborative filmmaking

What is the difference between using the arts in organizing and political art? This workshop muses on dilemmas of working with exploited, politically activated communities in crisis. How do we take the act of filmmaking collaboratively seriously if participants are genuinely so in crisis, their time and labor is at a breaking point—they can’t afford to spend the time to truly co-author a film? What does filmmaking really entail and how do we break it into its fundamental pieces, to make it as agile, scrappy, negotiable and modular, without resorting to “stunt” co-credits or misrepresenting labor and power relations in filmmaking and organizing. By borrowing from a recent project with erotic laborers, massage workers and migrant workers in active organizing and resistance, artist and scholar Diana Mulan Zhu will draw on dialectical behavioral therapy, software engineering, fluxus, and crip practices to guide a workshop on making films on smartphones in her “docufiction” approach, covering costume, set design, cinematography, lighting, editing, performance, graphics and sound.