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- Convenors:
-
Anna Lisa Ramella
(Leuphana University Lüneburg)
Anja Dreschke (Berlin University of the Arts)
Simone Pfeifer (Goethe University Frankfurt)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
- Working groups:
- Media (Anthropology)
- Location:
- Seminargebäude S14
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract
This workshop discusses questions of un/commoning of media and curatorial practices. How do multimodal and media-related projects – as forms of knowledge production – critically engage with questions of solidarity, responsibility and mutual care, but also the perpetuation of power structures?
Long Abstract
In this workshop, we invite contributions that discuss the un/commoning of media and curatorial practices. Media practices of curating and exhibiting often embrace multimodality, reflecting diverse modes of fieldwork, production and representation that transcend the often implied online/offline divide. Multimodality is often recognized as fostering new forms of knowledge production, as an attempt at collaborative, co-creative, decentring and more egalitarian modes of knowing. Yet acknowledging its embeddedness in global capitalism and technoscience, we also have to ask ourselves how and when these multimodal media and curatorial practices inadvertently perpetuate, reproduce, or reinforce existing power structures, extractivist logics, or experiences of violence and exclusion. With regard to the un/commoning of media and curatorial practices we ask the question of how can or should these practices contribute to new forms of solidarity, responsibility and mutual care? We invite discussions of multimodal and media-related projects that critically relate to questions of un/commoning through media and curatorial practices, or that thematically engage with global debates around un/commoning. What does un/commoning mean in the context of media anthropology? How can questions of un/commoning be approached through our practice as media anthropologists (methodologically and thematically)? The workshop is related to the exhibition "Out of focus. Blurring the lines of media practices and curatorial spaces” that will take place during the conference (see separate exhibition call). Multimodal/media/curatorial projects discussed in the workshop can be displayed in the exhibition. If you wish to do so, please indicate this in your abstract and additionally respond to the exhibition call.
Accepted contributions
Session 1 Tuesday 30 September, 2025, -Contribution short abstract
This presentation outlines a cross-disciplinary arts-based research project involving a collaboration between myself, a visual anthropologist, and Selena Kimball, a visual artist.
Contribution long abstract
This presentation outlines a cross-disciplinary arts-based research project involving a collaboration between myself, a visual anthropologist, and Selena Kimball, a visual artist. The work centres around an unassuming collection of stones found in the archives of the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture. The rocks were gathered in the early 1900s by Erland Nordenskiöld, a Swedish anthropologist who specialised in South American material culture and history. Kept alongside many other indigenous artefacts (baskets, pottery, tools, carvings), they have been sitting undisturbed in the museum’s storage drawers for over a century.
My paper describes our process of re-engaging with this overlooked collection of rocks. While there is scant information in the museum's archives about their provenance or cultural significance, their history is clearly connected to the larger institutional narratives of so many existing ethnographic collections linking anthropology to colonialism, the organisation and management of archives to the administration of order in the world.
This project (also submitted as an installation proposal for the Out of Focus exhibition) calls attention to such practices through upending traditional ethnographic approaches to object labelling and classification. Our collaboration mobilises intimate, personalised, ‘storied’ exchanges of writing and images that reveal the rocks’ significance not through conventional taxonomies, but through embracing their shifting and entangled relationships and encounters over time. We employ exploratory methods of archival research, use Surrealist- inspired practices of collage, automatic writing and ‘involuntary sculpture’, and playfully experiment with the multi-modal practice of ‘redescription’ to theorise and operationalise decolonising, un/commoning methods within the ethnographic museum.
Contribution short abstract
The 'Bundle Explorer' is a newly developed research tool, designed for creating and sharing visual knowledge for and together with audiences. The prototype on 'Touch' invites people to explore, visually, the multifarious diversity of ways of touching in digital childhood.
Contribution long abstract
The 'Bundle Explorer' is a research tool designed for creating and sharing visual knowledge for and together with different audiences, fostering a process of communing research by recognizing, respecting, and productively mobilizing different interests and perspectives.
It is a newly developed multimodal interactive online research tool that is based upon Wittgenstein’s language game approach and transforms his idea of a “grammatische Untersuchung” into a “zeigende Grammatik” (Mohn). The 'Bundle Explorer' also draws upon Schatzki's concept of practice-arrangement-bundles, whereby practices and their material arrangements are conceived as bundles of practices and arrangements (Schatzki). The 'Bundle Explorer' extends this idea by analytically bundling practices with practices.
The tool’s template, as well as its first prototype, the 'Bundle Explorer: Touch' were developed by Bina Mohn, Astrid Vogelpohl, and Pip Hare in the project “(Early) Childhood and Smartphone” (PI Jutta Wiesemann, SFB Media of Cooperation, University of Siegen) and can be deployed across diverse research contexts.
Based on short films created through attentive filming and analytically focussed editing, the ‘Bundle Explorer: Touch’ allows to explore the diversity of forms of touch in digital childhoods and the complex relationships between different overlapping (media) spaces: in the field, in research and in the exhibition space.
Link to the 'Bundle Explorer: Touch' (translation to English is in progress):
https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de/bundle-explorer
PW: SmartKids
Contribution short abstract
We activate our toolkit for the evaluation of multimodal research through a guided immersion and assessment process. The intervention is designed for both producers and evaluators of multimodal works, aiming to develop alternative forms of anthropological knowledge production.
Contribution long abstract
The past decade has witnessed a remarkable flourishing of experimental forms and formats of anthropological research: from games, comics, podcasts, and performance to walks, film, sound installations and multimedia web platforms, there is an increasing recognition that such multimodal forms and formats offer unique and compelling ways to capture and communicate research results, collaborate with research participants, as well as animate new audiences. And yet such forms remain marginal within the discipline.
Based upon an ambitious investigation and series of experimental workshops, the Multimodal Appreciation Research Group at the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology (Humboldt University) has developed a set of discursive tools and protocols designed to overcome these obstacles. The toolkit provides a structured framework for assessing multimodal anthropological works, recognizing their unique capacity to weave together diverse media forms, collaborative practices, and public engagement while expanding the traditional boundaries of anthropological knowledge production.
We will activate our "toolkit for the valuation and evaluation of multimodal research" through a guided immersion and assessment process. The intervention, which may well happen within the exhibition space, is designed for both producers and evaluators of multimodal works, aiming to develop strategies that legitimize alternative forms of anthropological knowledge production. Through collective exploration of evaluation practices, we aim to nurture an inclusive commons of appreciation that not only challenges academic hierarchies but actively builds new infrastructures for validating diverse forms of anthropological knowledge production.
Requirements: Projector, sound system, and wall space for displaying sample multimodal works. We will provide a prototype of the toolkit
Contribution short abstract
My talk discusses the Artists-in-Residence program at the African Music Archives (AMA) at JGU Mainz. The program is intended to give African musicians and sound artists access to a unique archive of African popular music, enabling them to use it for artistic research under their own questions.
Contribution long abstract
Since its founding in 1991, the African Music Archives (AMA) at JGU Mainz has provided a space where academic knowledge production and dissemination meets musical practice, exemplified by numerous concerts, lectures, performances, and exhibitions. The Artists-in-Residence program, launched in 2023, represents an attempt to bring both worlds closer together by inviting African musicians to conduct artistic research at the archives for one month at a time, developing their own questions and presenting the results to a public audience in a final performance at the end of their residency. The program is designed for groups of two artists and is intended to give them the opportunity to collaborate with each other and with other individuals working with and at the AMA in an open-ended way. Parts of the residency and final performances of the artists are documented on camera.
My talk reflects on the experiences made while planning and realizing three residencies with a total of five invited artists to date, together with colleagues from the Department of Anthropology and African Studies. I want to discuss the possibilities and challenges of commoning commercially realeased African popular music in a German university archive through transdisciplinary collaboration, focusing on artistic and academic research practices and institutional aspects such as financing, copyrights and visa bureaucracy, and how the involved actors navigated them. Next to sharing my experiences, I intend to critically evaluate the program for future editions, hoping that it can contribute to a more egalitarian space for individuals across continents and disciplinary backgrounds.
Contribution short abstract
Impactful scholarship on colonial heritage is hindered by the sheer scale of museum collections. This paper sees how exhibiting fewer cultural belongings and embracing particularity as a process of commoning resists colonial taxonomies and fosters rich entanglements.
Contribution long abstract
An obstacle that blocked the way to an impactful scholarship of colonial heritage of many Western museum collections is mainly their sheer abundance, a curatorial encounter to this overwhelming scale often replicates the original set of erratic actions that lead to this overwhelming clutter of cultural belongings. Decontextualized mass displays make systematic processing difficult, as individual Heritage objects are buried in sheer quantity and lose their distinct way creating what Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung refers to as a "choke" an experience of epistemological indigestion.
To address the ailing body of imperial institutions, museums have relied on strategies such as taxonomical classification, chronological arrangement, thematic displays, and aesthetic groupings. Yet, these approaches, while aiming to provide clarity, often perpetuate Enlightenment’s claim to universality and totality, ultimately failing to engage with the individual complexity of cultural belongings.
This paper proposes minimizing museum displays as a potential strategy for commoning. It examines the epistemological and subversive strategies that emerge from working with a limited number of cultural objects. We believe curating fewer objects enables each piece to resist predetermined colonial taxonomies and patronizing narratives, fostering deeper engagement with the viewer. We argue that when the individuality (Particularity) of an Cultural artefact is acknowledged, it resonates with the visitor's own sense of individuality, creating a more affective and akin encounter.
Contribution short abstract
This contribution takes the multimodal, interactive online documentary (i-doc) Living Room as a starting point to discuss the potentials and risks of producing i-docs as part of anthropological research. Living Room is on display at the Out of Focus exhibition.
Contribution long abstract
Living Room is a multimodal, interactive online documentary (i-doc) which was created as part of my doctoral research into the demolition of a modernist public housing estate in London. The i-doc features the analyses, experiences and organising of those working-class, racialised residents who refuse the demolition assemblage. It asks how everyday life is made and re-made within and despite the structural violence of demolition, and the attendant dispossession, social cleansing and gentrification it engenders. Living Room offers the user the choice to experience any of the 5 main thematic strands in the order they wish. Legal proceedings, housing occupations, modernist architectural forms, the media, and everyday practices of homemaking are all options presented in an iterative, non-linear fashion via videos, collage, and audio. The form of the i-doc reflects the open-ended and uncertain nature of the demolition and foregrounds residents’ refusal of the loss of home. In my contribution I will discuss the affordances for anthropological research of the site’s architecture and of the absence of a linear narrative.