Short Abstract:

The AAS Curatorium has been established to support and further the creative and critical arts/media-making space in Australian anthropology. Our lab shares recent initiatives and collaborations that aim to hold space for the flourishing of more-than-textual forms of anthropological analysis.

Long Abstract:

Australia has held a significant place in the development of visual anthropology and its more recent multi-sensory, multimodal offshoots. This is a history that has been profoundly shaped by a vital and ongoing history of working with artists, scholars and filmmakers from many fields, in particular First Nations' collaborators, a history of sometimes tense and often generous relationships that has critically challenged and reshaped key anthropological assumptions and practices, a history that has highlighted, again and again, the interlinking political, ethical and aesthetic issues that are activated when working "beyond text".

Yet academic hierarchies continue to prioritize written texts over other forms of knowledge. The newly formed editorial AAS Curatorium Editorial Collective seeks to explore and extend what might be called the techne of digital scholarship by fostering a performative approach to critical-creative thinking, whereby academic "writing" is reformulated as multi- and intermedia curation, assemblage, composition and design.

In this lab, we will speak to a number of events and projects that will launch this initiative: the in-process development of a one-off experimental edition of TAJA for which we are building our own website to host these new forms of digitally orchestrated scholarship and a live online presentation series, The Curatorium Sessions. We invite participants to join us in a discussion of these new forms of intermedia analysis and so begin the work of building an intergenerational community of anthropological makers.