Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. (Trotsky, 1923)

The work-in-progress on collaborative interactive documentary about women’s homelessness in Lisbon will provide the starting point for discussion on active participation and co-creation in interactive documentary, with particular emphasis on questions of authorship and spectatorship and the relationship(s) between art and politics. Using as the framework Patricia Zimmerman’s concept of documentary film as “a complex ecology” (2019) with its specific relationship to “communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles”, the analysis of the political in this emerging art form is also based on Chantal Mouffe’s text Artistic Activism and Agonistic Space (2007) and Jacques Rancière’s The Janus-Face of Politicized Art (2010).​