Remediated memory, digital witnessing and engagement: A qualitative analysis of the interactive documentary ‘The Space We Hold’

Abstract

This paper sets out to study how creative documentary practices deconstruct traumatic memory, and then digitalise witnessing and engagement afforded by digital technology in the award-winning online interactive documentary The Space We Hold. Premised on culture memory studies and documentary studies, the social function of the documentary in reshaping narratives and forging public engagement has been discussed in this research. Interactive documentary becomes the unique visual artistic medium that allows the wider public to bear witness and emotionally experience the meaning of a traumatic past. This interactive project is reviewed as one site of memory to answer the main research question: ‘How does hypermediacy in an interactive documentary enable this non-linear storytelling structure to reframe the narrative and identity of a community that struggles for social justice?’. Along with presenting direct provocation through the innovative hypernarrative, this interactive documentary focuses on victims’ current lives, familial feelings and their contribution in pursuit of justice, showing depth in reflection and density in life. By exploring how The Space We Hold acts as a bear and agent to enhance audience engagement, I contend that the documentary is restyled as a space that allows individual memory to intertwine with collective memory through the combination of authorial expressivity and interactive participatory. In this pragmatic and reflexive approach to bear traumatic witness, we sense the constant battle between stigmatised communities and their reinterpreting narratives.