CREATIVE CONSULTANCY X EXPERIENCE DESIGN

Ancient ways into modern technologies - breaking the spear, shattering the frame and filling the vessel.

I find myself circling a question that feels unwieldy but necessary: can hybrid, non-linear storytelling offer a way to decolonise narrative, to create something more ethical and connective within the hall of mirrors that is contemporary digital culture? The question emerged out of a difficult, unresolved situation that caused me to rethink the stories I tell.

We are in an undeniably fertile moment for storytelling. New technologies, hybrid forms, and a renewed appetite for localised creative communities all suggest possibility. And yet, it is an oversaturated and precarious landscape. I’ve been seeking to redefine myself as a storyteller and filmmaker. It has been a process of not only considering the stories I tell but how, by looking at what methods to employ to straddle the ethical and creative issues I have historically faced. We live in a moment of fragile conflation where ‘lived experience’ dominates so much of the media landscape. The combination of the atomising nature of identity politics and the emotional gladiators of online platforms has created a minefield for those of us telling digital stories.

I will begin from an autobiographical standpoint, reflecting the trend for lived experience and the notion of autoethnography following an impasse with a documentary I had been trying to complete for over twenty years.

At the centre of this is a film I had been unable to finish, was a chance encounter in Rajasthan. What unfolded was a long, entangled relationship with a group of Kalbeliyan women, and one woman in particular. Over five years, the project became less an act of observation and more a shared experience of family intrigue and cross-cultural tragedy. By 2012, with a potential prestigious executive producer in place, the film had reached a near completed version. A talented, now award-winning, editor had been vital in carving a ninety-minute tome. So, some of the vital ticks needed to get the ball rolling on the release of an indie documentary were in place. Despite this, something instinctively held me back and I shelved the project, to the chagrin of many.

Jump forward nearly a decade. Out of the blue during lockdown, a person closely related to the film contacted me via Facebook. This was the very individual I wished to protect by not releasing the film. While wrapped in other threads the central heart of the story was the mystery surrounding a charismatic gypsy woman who married a Westerner.  When I started filming, she has heavily pregnant but grieving the loss of another child that had been taking without her permission to the other side of the world.  Her loss and its circumstance took me on a fascinating journey of confronting the psychological impact of tourism and the people it leaves behind in the deserts of Rajasthan.

I guilelessly thought that this was a beautiful and ethical way to complete the story. I took succour in how my past-self had rewarded their future-self. How wrong and naive I was. As the relationship developed, a further can of ethical worms erupted that drowned the project in a quagmire of who tells whose story, of secondary characters outside of the frame, and the tragedy of a central figure whose mental state had become broken due to the impact of the issues that my film explored.

Again, the project stalled, and this is where the line of inquiry begins. Not from theory, but from impasse. From the recognition that the structures I had been working within, linear narrative, character driven arcs, resolution, may themselves be part of the problem. That to complete the film in its current form might be to fix something that should remain open.

Theoretical frameworks have helped me sit with this, but they follow rather than lead. The work of cultural theorists and artists like Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Trinh T. Minh-ha has offered a discourse around decolonisation, hybridity, and the instability of representation. What resonates most is not a set of answers, but a permission to rethink form itself. To consider whether a more fragmented, non-linear approach might allow for different kinds of narratives, that resists closure, holds contradiction, and makes space for multiple subjectivities, including my own. The responsibility and caution about the precarious nature of power and agency in the stories we tell especially when we point the lens at others.

Transparency is needed. This is not without discomfort. To expose others do I need to expose myself?  I ruminated if I foreground my own position within the work risks shifting attention away from those whose lives first compelled the film. And yet, to erase that position is equally disingenuous. Objectivity is no longer a tenable stance. What remains is a question of how to be present without dominating, how to acknowledge entanglement without claiming ownership. These entanglements I explored theoretically through a systemic lens, from Heinz von Foerster’s second order cybernetics to Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology. Theories that embrace a more accountable positionality of involvement around the nature of observation, one that does not deny our influence, interaction, and interconnectivity with the subjects we explore.

What I am moving towards, tentatively, are forms that reflect these tensions. Narratives less resolved, more porous. Structures that allow for interruption, for return, for the coexistence of perspectives that do not neatly align. Not fragmentation as aesthetic, but as a way of holding what cannot be easily reconciled. In that sense, form is not separate from ethics, it is where the ethics are worked through. This is not novel, but for the most part has remained fringe. Do hybrid forms and emerging technologies hold the potential for this to become more digestible and accepted?

Returning to the material last year, I realised what I was grappling with was not simply whether to release the film, but whether its current form was capable of holding the complexity of what unfolded. The more I revisited it, the more the original structure, shaped around a central character and a narrative arc, felt insufficient, even complicit. A film which set out to examine exoticisation and the commodification of the other could itself risk reproducing those same gestures. Tellingly, I now realise I should have followed my initial instincts to tell a story that celebrated the weft and warp of the world I encountered, rather than shape an arc of narrative tension.

The relationships that developed during filming were never neutral. The blurring of lines between filmmaker and participant, observer and friend, was not an accident but the inevitability of long-term immersion. The issue of transference is something that has plagued traditional documentary frameworks, which often struggle with transparency around this type of ethical labyrinth. They rely on a false notion of distance that, in practice, rarely exists. To acknowledge proximity, bias, and emotional investment is to unsettle the authority of the narrative itself. In this present moment, perhaps that destabilisation is necessary.

In this sense, the question is not simply whose story this is, but how a story might be held without reducing those within it to narrative function. The language of character begins to feel inadequate, even violent in its implications. What I am left with is a series of relationships, moments, none of which resolve cleanly, and none of which feel as though they should be made to. Only last night I watched My Father’s Shadow, Akinola Davies Jr’s portrait of two young brothers who navigate a picaresque journey into 1993 Lagos with their estranged father. While fiction, the film embraces a hypnotic blend of hallucinogenic moments with social realism. Drawn from personal and historical truths, it conveyed a world that defied a coherent arc but remained engaging and powerful. It encapsulated a hinterland that both provokes and evokes with equal force.

Let us push this beyond the realm of the frame and turn towards not only the non-linear but hybrid forms that begin to feel both an aesthetic preference and an ethical necessity. Influences that I have long been drawn to include ensemble storytelling such as Theatre de Complicite and Punchdrunk, and layered narratives from Paul Thomas Anderson to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Traversing both elliptical and experimental filmmaking, alongside immersive and site responsive work, start to offer ways through. From epic structures that resist singular protagonists, to practices that invite the audience into a more interactive and interpretive role, there is a sense that meaning can be distributed rather than imposed.

Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory offers a particularly resonant lens. Her refusal of the dominant heroic narrative model of conflict, conquest, and resolution opens up the possibility of stories that are accumulative rather than extractive. Stories that hold, rather than drive. This feels closely aligned with what I am looking for: a way of working that allows for continuity without forcing closure, that resists the compulsion to shape lived experience into something neatly consumable.

In regard to a broader cultural moment, there is a growing desire to return to something more tangible, more embodied, a desire for shared experience that exists beyond the screen. And yet this desire is itself mediated, shaped by the very digital infrastructures it seeks to escape. We are caught between a craving for connection and the systems that fragment it. Timothy Morton’s notion of the mesh, the entanglement of all living and non-living things, offers a way of understanding this not as a problem to be solved, but as a condition to be inhabited, one that includes the uncanny, discomfort, and potential paradox.

My return to India in 2025 brought these tensions into sharp relief. The physical landscape had shifted, communities displaced, spaces reconfigured in the name of progress. The Kalbeliyan families I knew remained on the margins, their lives continuing in altered but familiar patterns of poverty and resilience. At the same time, the digital sphere intruded with a force that felt both distant and immediate. Mobile phones and Instagram were as familiar to them as to us. These were the very tools the western side of the family sought to weaponize. Messages from those connected to the story attempted to control its telling, to reshape its history, exerting pressure through threat and coercion, creating a parallel narrative.

Amidst these threats was a continual demonisation of the people I made my film about. Those that acted as their benefactors, threatened to cut off any help, financial or otherwise, if they continued to interact with me. What presented itself as care felt, in practice, like control. Suddenly I was navigating a force that could deter me from factual filmmaking altogether. I was not the first, nor will I be the last filmmaker to experience this, but again it made me question the process in this madness.

Amidst this, my penultimate morning in Pushkar unfolded in a moment of absurd violence. My nerves were already frayed by a steady digital bombardment from those outside the frame of the original film. I was jolted awake by a tumultuous crashing above and around me. It sounded as if something or someone was trying to break through the roof into my room. In that half sleep, half waking state, there was a flash of something close to terror, an irrational but visceral sense that I had somehow disturbed the karmic order of things.

As consciousness returned, I realised it wasn’t Hanuman’s army, but the local langur monkeys, a troop of them tearing across the rooftop, dragging and throwing heavy furniture in their morning play. The ordinariness of it, at least for India, once realised, was almost comical. And yet a feeling lingered. A moment poised between fear and recognition, that seemed to echo something of the wider situation. The way in which meaning is constructed in states of uncertainty, how quickly we impose narrative, how easily we slip into imagining consequence, blame, even punishment. Perhaps in some way echoing a mantle of colonial guilt, a shadow hovering, holding to account an itinerant filmmaker privileged to leave whenever she can.

The irony was that in my years of spending time with the Kalbelyan community, aside from the occasional hustle and requests for lassi or money, I had been met with a sense of protection, albeit of its own chaotic nature. What struck me was how, on the ground, with the Kalbelyan families I became close to, I was met with warmth and humour, an unspoken recognition built over the years. Whatever complexities existed, they were held within human exchange, that was messy, direct and intimate.   Yet they know this is part of their currency - their charm.  Where their social positioning at the bottom rung, even outside the caste system, gives them very little room for social betterment, dancing and well-meaning tourists became economic resources, that was often unsustainable and fraught with complexity.

To return to those who positioned themselves as protectors of the story and sought to control from a distance. The dark and diminishing picture they painted of the people they claimed to support, while attempting to assert ownership over a narrative that was never solely theirs is another layer of unseen power dynamic. Their paranoia was understandable, while their methods were questionable, their motives were less so. I too in their position would be fiercely protective of my agency in a story that would impact me if released into the world, the digital hall of mirrors shaped by raging populism, the might of public opinion and the cancel culture.

These contradictions and power plays are difficult to reconcile. Those perceived as vulnerable and in need of protection were, in my direct experience, exercising generosity and openness. Those claiming to safeguard them operated through pressure, distortion, and at times intimidation. It forced a deeper question, not only of who has the right to tell a story, but who gets to define its terms, and how power circulates through those claims of protection and ownership. It is within this space that the question of form returns. How to create something that does not attempt to resolve these contradictions, but allows them to coexist? How to acknowledge the pressures, ethical, emotional, political, without collapsing under them or simplifying them into narrative clarity?

What I am moving towards is not a solution, but a method of staying with the problem. A form that is open, that resists singular perspective, that allows for interruption and multiplicity. Hybrid, non-linear, collaborative where possible. A practice that recognises its own limitations, and in doing so, perhaps avoids some of the violences of more traditional approaches.

If there is a through line, it is this: that storytelling is not separate from the conditions in which it is made. That form is not neutral. And that in rethinking how a story is structured, how it moves, who it centres, what it leaves unresolved, there may be the potential to create something more ethical, more connected, even within the fractured, reflective surfaces of contemporary culture.

I have not abandoned narrative altogether but am beginning to resist the conventions of traditional forms, especially in documentary. While I do not reject the influence of the lived experience, I want to engage with it more deeply, searching for more playful and expansive ways of doing so, ways that allow for interpretation, collaboration, and a loosening of form.

One current project offers a starting point. It brings together fable and documentary, offering reworking the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin in collaboration with a musician, a puppeteer, and an interactive children’s storyteller.  The storyteller is Trix Robertson of Mossy Crow, whose grown up sons with Fragile X are central to the project. Through this, we are exploring the ethics of genetic editing via Trix’s lived experience as a mother, developing the work collaboratively with her sons, whose lives are directly shaped by Fragile X syndrome, and folding their voices and performances into the process itself.  There is uncertainty around how this will manifest, but at least what has gone before will inform a new vison that gives marginalised communities more agency in the stories told about them.

Through a blend of puppetry, analogue film, and theatre, the emphasis shifts toward process as much as the product. The work will evolve through play, improvisation, and encounter, rather than observation alone. While remaining rooted in lived reality, it opens a space for the magical and the uncanny, what Timothy Morton has described as the strange entanglement of ‘realist magic’. A space in which to blend, test, and reimagine.

I have only begun to touch on the genesis of this exploration.  In the introduction to Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices, edited by Ida Bencke and Jørgen Bruhn, a quote from Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods resonates: “There are many kinds of life,” said Spike, mildly. “Humans always assumed that theirs was the only kind that mattered. That’s how you destroyed your planet.”  As creators we need to level the creative field, no longer playing as auteur gods but celebrating community over outcome.

Another reverberation, another mirror, of Morton’s dark ecological entanglement. Nothing is neat, nothing is separate. For now, I have deliberately avoided the AI elephant in the room.  I do not wish to dispel the land of technological immersion, but I feel the analogue, the visceral calls, a shared basket of experiences, of how to tell stories that remain open to that mess(h) and complexity, that embrace the raw mystery of both the known and unknowable.

‍