Paper short abstract:

Towards the Ethnography of Filmic Space: Engaging with the Trans-national Imaginary of a Mexican Migrant Community Through Event Video

Paper long abstract:

In Tlaxcala, Mexico, families are routinely divided as parents leave young children to go north in search of work. Event videos allow migrant parents to watch their children growing up, involved in lavish celebrations, and digitally placed in utopian landscapes. This paper conceptualizes the role of event videos in creating a filmic space, within which the members of physically divided families, experience, idealized and performed versions of each other and themselves.

This space challenges the epistemological and methodological approaches of visual anthropology, and its investigation necessitates the improvisation of novel methodological and formal approaches. This paper will describe the way in which close collaborative involvement in the production and consumption of event videos, and their incorporation as 'found footage' in an assemblage video, '900,00 frames between us' enables the exploration and evocation of this space and it's complex links to memory, imagination and lived experience; an ethnography of filmic space.