TA
Teri and James Harper-Bailie
Redacted
This short film aims to negotiate the public/private dynamics at play within our collaborative research, in particular it aims to highlight a blurring of the boundaries between the personal, the private and the public. Sarah Wall recognised this blurring within autoethnographic practices, and writes ‘people are more fascinated by silly, exotic or private details’ (Wall, 2008:50), acknowledging that voyeurism and the ability of personal stories to ‘indulge our cultures perverse curiosity about the private’ (Ellis and Buchner in Wall, 2008: 8) may be to blame.
This theme of perverse curiosity into ‘the private’ is a concept that is familiar to us. As collaborative researchers people are almost always more interested in how a married couple living and researching together might sustain a balance for as long as we have, rather than what it is that we are actually researching. Meaning we walk a fine line between letting an audience and reader in, whilst keeping them at an arms length away and directing their gaze at what we want to look at. Redacted is an overt attempt at this, throughout the film we have carefully chosen the moments we are comfortable sharing. Whilst augmenting the moments that we are not, leaving space for the audience to fill in a narrative for themselves.
Teri and James Harper-Bailie are wife and husband, artistic-researchers, and are currently undertaking a collaborative practice as research (PaR) PhD in Performance Studies at the University of Plymouth. Their performance practice has recently shifted from a studio practice to performance made for film while their research interests are the everyday performance of social class within a shared domestic space, non-hierarchical forms of knowledge production and collaboration.
