ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 is titled “Polyphonic Collaborations.” It refutes the idea of documentary as representing one voice or one idea or a unified narrative. Instead, it posits that open space new media documentary features a mosaic of voices articulating complex social and political issues. The chapter weaves together a theoretical model of polyphony from music history, postmodern theory, and postcolonial historiography to advance the idea of choral multiplicities that counter unified narrative to produce layered, multiple temporalities and heterogeneities. In baroque music, polyphony refers to the layering of several melodies, identified as the ars combinatoria. Postmodern nonfiction writer Svetlana Alexievich advocates for a multiplicity of voices to generate a microhistory of the everyday, focusing on traumatic events such as Chernobyl and the end of the Soviet Union. Historian Michel Foucault offers the idea of the heterotopia, a place where many different actions and people convene. Historian Elizabeth Ermath advocates for a plurality of contexts in collage as a form of historical explanation that displaces narrative causality. Theorist Dipesh Chikrabarty suggests that history needs to move away from the powerful and the nation towards a radical heterogeneity of the subaltern. Historiographer Robert Berkhofer argues that the polyvocal with its disjunctures, conjunctures, and ruptures dismantles the great story mobilized by narrative. The chapter also offers the idea of the mosaic as a structure for polyphonic collaborations, the assembling of fragments to make a whole. This chapter looks at four projects operating as polyphonic collaborations exploring contested issues: Precious Places (US), which does community-based microdocumentaries on multicultural hidden histories; Babylon ’13 (Ukraine), a aggregated project documenting environmental and political movements for civil society in Ukraine after the Maidan Revolution; EngageMedia (Indonesia), a portal for Asian Pacific content with works on environmental destruction and migrant workers; and Jerusalem We Are Here (Canada), which focuses on reclaiming the diverse histories of the Katamon area of Jerusalem, which represses the histories of Greeks, Palestinians, and others. Polyphonic collaborations move from the temporal to the spatial and from the singular to the plural, in slow, long relationship building.
