This investigation is a tribute to the cinematographic work of Chick Strand (San Francisco, 1931-2009). In 1979, filmmaker Chick Strand shot the 16mm ethnographic film Soft Fiction.

A film that breaks with narrative clichés for representing women and images of erotic and sexual fantasies.

Expanding the lines of work followed by Soft Fiction, the book offers an approach to the different operations that the cinematographic apparatus sutures, and feminist politics of visuality and dis-identity. The publication Soft Fiction is conceived as an active writing device, as understood in the broad sense. It relates the different levels of feminist practices of visuality, narratives of fiction and documentary accounts. It proposes a possible praxis in the area of collaborative pedagogies around image. The book you’re holding navigates the relationship between social knowledge and gender, class, race and daily resistance. The terrain this compilation of essays and stories moves through is the fictionalization of the everyday Gaze, the notion of document. Filming, naming, recording, photographing, digitalizing affective memory and the way history impacts personal relations, sexuality, love and political activism.

This book draws together texts by Juan Antonio Suárez, Paula Rabinowitz, Gabriela Golder, Virginia Villaplana Ruiz, Angela Melitopoulos, Hito Steyerl, Habiba Djahnine, Marina Gržinić, Sandra Schäfer, Montse Romaní, Harriet Brown, María Ruido, Itziar Ziga, Caroline Betemps & June Fernández, Medeak, Ainhoa Güemes Moreno, Eduardo Hurtado, Maider Zilbeti, Manu Arregui, Saioa Olmo, Susana Talayero, María Díaz Merlo & Fefa Vila Núñez, R. Lucas Platero, Julia Morandeira, Nataša Sukič, Sayak Valencia and Gilles Deleuze.

Virginia Villaplana Ruiz is an artist and a writer. She is a Teacher of Communication at the University of Murcia. Her research field concentrates on visual studies, the analysis of network communication and filmic discourses, and notions of identity, gender, participation, memory and community, utilizing creative methodologies such as the Do it yourself (DIY)/Do it together (DIT) Media-biography. She is the author of the following books: El instante de la memoria, Cine infinito and Relatos culturales sobre la violencia de género. She has given seminars on gender studies at Birkbeck, University of London, University Centre of Limburg, Institute of international Visual Arts (London), University of Roehampton, University of Antwerp (Brussels) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Virginia is a member of the editorial board of the journal Arte y Políticas de Identidad. She is currently developing the project Subtramas. Plataforma de coaprendizaje sobre las prácticas de producción audiovisual colaborativas. Among her latest works she has been carrying out are cinema, photography and installation projects: Contranarrativas (Museo Contemporáneo Es Baluards); Un saber realmente útil. Subtramas (Museo Nacional Reina Sofía); Causa en Común (Centro de Arte Montehermoso); Poéticas del olvido (Buenos Aires); Diario de sueños Intermitentes (Musac); Narrar la historia (OffLimits- Museo Nacional Reina Sofía); Narrativas de la transición española (Montevideo); Poéticas de la resistencia (Visor); En una corta unidad de tiempo (MediaLab Prado); Working Documents (Centro de La Imagen); Imaginarios en Tránsito (Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo); and In/security in a global context. The City of Women (Ljubljana). Worthy of special note among the research awards she has received are: XV Premio de ensayo “Manuel Gil Pérez”; Premio Nacional. Artes Visuales, MAV (Ministerio de Educación, Asociación Nacional Mujeres en las Artes Visuales); and the Award Espais de la crítica de arte. Real TV (Fundación Espais d´art contemporani).