Investigative Fiction

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In an era where information, artificial, and ecological systems interweave, a new synthetic form of creative practice emerges. This workshop invites participants to meld rigorous open-source investigation with imaginative worldbuilding. Guided by the idea of synthesis, participants will weave data with narrative, reality with fiction, and the tangible with the conceptual.

In her practice, Anna Engelhardt works with the tension between the evidence and myth, conducting open-source investigations as a means to ground her storytelling. Recreating a sandbox environment informed by her previous investigative projects, the workshop will provide participants with means to make their own investigative fiction. 

Participants will collect data around predefined cases, themed around artificial and informational ecologies, to use as the content in the worlbuilding exercises. We will not merely transform the raw data into fiction but will approach worldbuilding tools, such as scene and character prompts, genre devices, tropes, varied points of view, and the creation of evocative moodboards, as a means of creative research.

Anna Engelhardt is an alias of a research-based video artist and writer. Her investigative practice follows the traces of material violence, focusing on what could be seen as the ‘ghost’ of information. The toxic information environments she deals with stem from structures of occupation and dispossession. Interested in the data haze around political events, she reconstructs their genesis by working through the tension between evidence and fiction.

This workshop will take place on the 15th and 16th of November, from 18:00 till 21:00, and will be delivered in English, at the Aulario in Matadero Madrid.

Participants should bring their own laptop.