Battledress: Deconstructing Autofiction and Reassembling the Selves in Immersive Documentary

BATTLEDRESS, is a multidisciplinary, multiform research project by Genn (Manchester Writing School) and Ballin (SODA), Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). The research was presented in two UK exhibitions: Festival of the Mind, (2022), MODAL Gallery, (2023) and the immersive film has screened internationally including; Fete of Britain, Factory International, (2024) and SXSW (2025). The first iteration of BATTLEDRESS was Genn’s autofiction ‘Streetfighting Girls’ (New Statesman 2021). The second, enlarged Genn’s autofiction by her ‘repositioning herself…through others’ similar experiences, to arrive, at a broader first person narrative, (Ullsdotter, 2021) creating a ‘container’ (Le Guin, 1986 ) for more than one woman’s story. Two working class writers shared teenage memories of fashion and fighting, interwoven with archival material in a layered two screen immersive film in an attempt to aerate working class women's histories. This chapter builds on a previous co-authored paper that investigated how oral history and archive can be entwined with expanded immersive techniques to create alternative ‘encountered’ (Scott-Stevenson, 2019) histories of working-class women’s experiences, exploring our practice-based immersive methodology as an interactive device. We examine how each iteration of BATTLEDRESS pushes this reflexive act ‘into a more direct and intimate sphere’ where makers are ‘observing and analysing themselves as they engage in the act of creation,’ (Skains 2018, 84). It advocates artistic research as ‘thinking through making’ (Ravetz, 2018,159; Ingold, 2013, 6), placing value on ‘unforeseen admixture and the…folding of process, affect and material’ where ‘the resulting bricolage will be a complex, dense, reflexive, collage-like creation’ (Stewart, 2010, 128). We question structures and relationships within extended storytelling forms that blur traditional lines of narrative reasoning to highlight how our paradoxical efforts to disrupt narrative to induce immersion, allowed for an ethereal strobing of past and future selves supporting jostling truths about the past that are “let-be” rather than captured.