Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the points of tension in the relationship between the representations of modernity and realities of a migrant's life. It aims to share the challenges of filmmaking and ethnography made “at home” as tools to negotiate global representations and personal expectations.

Paper long abstract:

Visual anthropology offers performative techniques which, aptly and explicitly used, allow to create links between images and historical situations, “the imaginary realized and the real imagined” (Mbembe 2001: 242). More than how to prove its legitimacy as a knowledge-producing discipline, either how to distinguish it from art filmmaking, my questions focus on how to keep reinventing its tools and explaining their implications while addressing theoretical and empirical concerns.

With this paper I will share the experience of tracing the cartography of paradoxes (Latour 2005) and points of tension in the relationship between representations of modernity and realities of a migrant's life. I argue that these representations, as related to commodities, have visual dimensions. Therefore, with the means of visual anthropology, I am tracing the materiality of my family's first encounters with the Western world in Poland in the 90s; the work of Polish truck drivers who spend three weeks in the transitory space of highways in Western Europe and who reconnect to their family life for a fixed time of one week; as well as the dilemmas of a Guinean friend who settles down in UK after 10 years of exile in Poland. I am also filming my own conflicts and reconciliations between cosmopolitan habits, the comfortable affiliation to the Belgian social benefits’ system, and dreams of settlement back in Poland.

Sharing my textual and visual findings, I will also discuss methodological challenges of experimental filmmaking and ethnography “at home” as tools to negotiate global representations and personal expectations.