International Surrealism and the Contemporary Epoch: A Surrealist Document with Questions, Principles and Memory Maps

Surrealism, in the past decade, and increasingly in the last three years, has received heightened recognition, resurgence, and reevaluations of its international origins, geographical confluences and continued influence on our contemporary world. This Practice as Research thesis, consisting of both a scholarly study and a documentary on International Surrealism, stands as a critical interrogation around what Surrealism is, and generates primary research archiving the historical prominence of surrealism and examining the philosophical tenets offered by what arguably remains one of the most important avant-garde movements to reflect on this epoch. The numerous filmed interviews within the documentary declare an original record and portrait of the surrealist movement by words of those most closely associated to it. The corresponding thesis outlines the historical genealogy of the Surrealism outside of the presumed center and maps a more complicated and nuanced depiction of “what is” Surrealism. Questions of the relevance of Surrealism are revisited through more undervalued aspects of the movement’s engagement in radical politics, revolution and struggle, and various responses of the movement, whether these be in the form of provocations, pamphleteering or invocations of solidarity and activism. In addition to examining the movement’s overarching historical and political lessons, the question of the relationship of cinema and surrealism is reviewed, arguing that cinema might have had a larger role in the conception the movement beyond the engagements noted by the French theorist André Breton. This documentary film and ongoing archive project on Surrealism offers a constellation of filmed interviews made with various major interlocutors engaged and focal to the movement. These artists, theoreticians, scholars, curators, collectors, family members and friends recount their memories, stories, and thoughts on this movement doubling as testimonies and new research within the field of Surrealism acting as the main emphasis within this Creative Practice doctorate. These memory maps as embedded in the documentary film tease out the constitution of what is a surrealist document, and lead to multiple and revealing meditations that point to how Surrealism can respond to the growing challenges of the contemporary world.