Interview Series: Interviews with Curators, Artists and Cultural Thinkers | Interview: Gökhan Çolak

Visual Storytelling and Interdisciplinary Research

Your work brings together documentary cinema, cultural research, and visual storytelling. In your view, how does film production function as a field of inquiry for reflecting on contemporary art and cultural production?

Film has always been my way of thinking through ideas. That’s where my deep thinking happens, while I translate complexity to engaging storytelling. When I make a documentary, the process of research, of sitting with a subject for months or years, of finding the visual language to hold a complex idea, that is itself a form of inquiry. With “Radical Landscapes,” for example, I spent 10 years inside the archive of the 9999 group, my father’s radical architecture collective from late 1960s Florence. The film became a way to ask questions about utopia, about the relationship between art and politics, about what gets remembered and what gets erased, about life and death. Documentary cinema documents while offering new knowledge. It creates a space where cultural production can be examined, questioned, and felt, all at once.

In your documentary projects, you often focus on themes related to art, architecture, and cultural heritage. How does this interdisciplinary approach shape your creative process?

I’ve never been able to stay inside one discipline, and honestly I think that’s where the most interesting work happens. My background spans journalism, documentary, digital media, architecture (through my family), and now AI filmmaking. Each of these fields has its own way of seeing, its own rigor. When I approach a project about cultural heritage, I’m thinking like a researcher and a filmmaker simultaneously. The architecture informs the framing. The journalistic instinct pushes me to ask harder questions. The artistic impulse gives me permission to be poetic. This layering is central to how I work. A project like the 9999 Archive research required me to be an archivist, a daughter, a historian, and a visual storyteller all at once. Those roles inform and deepen each other.

Archive, Memory, and Cultural Heritage

In several of your projects, you engage with archives and historical materials, reinterpreting visual and cultural memory. What does working with archives mean to you as a process of research and discovery?

Archives are alive. That’s the first thing people misunderstand. They think of archives as static, settled, dusty. But when you enter an archive, especially one you have a personal connection to, you’re entering a conversation with time. I am the custodian of the 9999 Archive, the collection of work left by my late father and his collaborators in the Florentine radical architecture movement. Working with that material has been one of the most profound creative experiences of my life. You find things you didn’t expect. You discover connections the original creators may not have seen. You hold a sketch from 1971 and suddenly understand something about the present. For me, archival work is a form of listening. And the act of reinterpreting that material through film, through exhibitions, through new technologies, is how we keep cultural memory honest and dynamic rather than frozen. The coolest thing? A million stories told in a million ways can stem from the same archive.

Digital Transformation and New Media

Today, visual culture and storytelling are increasingly shaped by digital tools and new media technologies. How do you think this transformation is influencing artistic production and forms of visual narration?

We’re living through a fundamental shift in who gets to tell stories and how. Digital and AI tools have democratized production in ways that would have been unimaginable when I started in journalism and documentary. But what interests me most right now is the emergence of AI as a creative medium. I work as a Creative Partner with platforms like Seedance, Runway, Sora, Leonardo, Pika, InVideo, CapCut, and ElevenLabs, and I’ve been making AI films since early in this wave back in 2022. What I see happening is that the tools are changing the grammar of visual storytelling. You can now create imagery that sits between photography and painting, between documentary and dream. The transformation is both technical and conceptual. It’s in how we think as much as in how we make and what we produce. It’s forcing us to rethink what an image is, what authorship means, what “real” looks like. For visual culture, that’s enormously exciting and also demands real critical thinking.

Artificial Intelligence and Creative Production

In recent years, you have also explored AI-assisted visual production and cinema. How do you evaluate the creative possibilities that artificial intelligence offers for filmmaking and visual culture?

AI has given me a new language. My upcoming film “Alma Robot,” which won four international awards, is a hybrid work that used AI-generated imagery alongside live footage I shot in Patagonia under Paolo Sorrentino’s mentorship. What AI allows me to do is visualize the interior, the emotional, the abstract, in ways that traditional cinematography can’t always reach. I can give form to memory, to grief, to transformation. The films that matter are still driven by a point of view, by craft, by something the filmmaker needs to say: the message. I teach AI filmmaking at Franklin University Switzerland and in workshops internationally, and the first thing I tell my students is that the technology is only as interesting as the person using it. That’s why I focus a lot on students understanding the importance of their Voice. The creative possibilities are extraordinary, but they require the same rigor and intentionality as any other form of cinema.

Creative Practice Between Past and Future

Your work often combines historical research with experimental production using new technologies. How do you establish a balance between exploring cultural heritage and experimenting with emerging technologies?

For me, there’s no tension between research and new tech. In fact, they need each other. The radical architects of 1960s Florence were themselves technologists and dreamers. They used the tools of their time, Super 8 film, performance, inflatable structures, to imagine different futures…while they explored the topic of human vs tech in the actual artwork. When I use AI to reinterpret or extend their work, I’m continuing that same impulse. The 9999 group believed art should be experimental, interdisciplinary, and forward-looking. Working with their archive through contemporary technology feels like honoring their philosophy. Heritage gives you roots. Technology gives you reach. The balance comes from never letting one override the other. You stay grounded in research, in history, in genuine understanding of the material. And then you let the new tools open doors you couldn’t have opened before.

Cinema, Exhibitions, and Art Institutions

Some of your films are presented not only in cinematic contexts but also within museums and art institutions. How do you see the relationship between cinema and contemporary art institutions evolving?

The boundaries have been dissolving for years, and I think that’s a good thing. My work has been shown in film festivals and in art contexts, and each space brings out something different in the same piece. Cinema in a theater is a temporal experience; you surrender to the filmmaker’s rhythm. In a gallery or museum, the viewer has more autonomy, more time, more space to circle back. What I find most interesting is how AI cinema is accelerating this convergence. AI-generated films often have a painterly, textural quality, a feeling of time-suspended that feels very much at home in exhibition spaces. And the questions they raise about authorship, about the nature of images, about technology and humanity, are questions that contemporary art institutions are uniquely equipped to hold. I think and hope we’ll see more and more filmmakers working across both worlds, and that the distinction between “cinema” and “art” will matter less than the quality of the thinking.

Aesthetics and Narrative Construction

When constructing a visual narrative, which aesthetic or intellectual approaches influence your storytelling?

I come from a very specific visual lineage. Growing up Florentine, surrounded by Renaissance architecture and the radical experiments of my father’s generation, and the Florence Film Festival my parents founded and ran, as well as their later subtitling company they started from our home, gave me a deep sense that beauty and ideas are inseparable. My aesthetic is grounded in composition, in light, in the emotional weight of an image and its meaning. Intellectually, I’m drawn to the space between the personal and the political, the intimate and the historical. I think a lot about Walter Benjamin’s idea of the “dialectical image,” the way a single visual moment can hold past and present in tension. I also carry my journalism training with me. There’s a commitment to truth, to specificity, to earning every claim you make. Even in my most experimental AI work, I’m always asking: what is this image doing? What does it mean? Is it honest? I love the editing process because of this final decision making.

The New Generation of Creators

As both a filmmaker and educator, you work with younger generations of creatives. What do you see as the main opportunities and challenges that young artists and filmmakers face in the digital age?

The opportunity is extraordinary. The tools available today mean that a student with a laptop can create work that would have required a full production crew ten years ago. In my university classes at Franklin University Switzerland or teenagers at Locarno Film Festival, I watch students go from first concept to finished AI film in a matter of days or weeks. The creative barrier to entry has never been lower. But that’s also the challenge. When everyone can make something, the question becomes: do you have something to say? The risk of the AI era is a flood of technically impressive but emotionally empty work. What I try to give my students is a framework for thinking, for developing a point of view, for understanding why they’re making something before they figure out how. The other challenge is critical literacy. Young creators need to understand these tools deeply enough to use them with intention. Many stem from the Covid era and grew up on socials and screens so the curiosity, engagement with others and hunger to learn is something very delicate to see in them. The ones who combine technical fluency with voice, confidence, sensitivity and genuine artistic vision are going to do remarkable things.

The Future of Visual Culture

Finally, considering the evolving relationship between contemporary art, cinema, and technology, how do you envision the future of visual storytelling in the coming years?

I think we’re heading toward a moment where the categories we’ve relied on, film, art, design, technology, will feel increasingly inadequate. So will the vocabulary to understand, discuss and argue about it all. The most compelling work is already happening in the spaces between disciplines. AI cinema is one example. The 9999 Archive work is another: a project that is simultaneously historical research, family memoir, and experimental media. What excites me is that the next generation of creators won’t have to choose between being a filmmaker or an artist or a technologist. They can be all of those things at once, the way the radical architects of the 1960s were simultaneously designers, architects, philosophers, performers, and provocateurs. They said, “The most important project was the project of our life.” The future of visual culture belongs to people who can think across boundaries, who understand both the weight of history and the possibilities of new tools, and who have something urgent and human to say. That’s what I’m working toward, in my films, in my teaching, and in everything Fiumi Studios does.