Paper short abstract:

In this paper I engage the installation and the video-essay as powerful forms to be deployed in the context of ethnographies of turbulent border zones, including my ethnographc site, the Tijuana-US border.

Paper long abstract:

After a long term commitment to an Anthropology of Art and to an Ethnography of the border zone between Mexico and USA, my relation with the 'writing on' the 'Other' and to the representational method characteristic of anthropological practice found a limit. The ethnographic essay, even in its most experimental forms, couldn't fulfill the sense of the 'unsayable' and 'uncertain' we always face in a given ethnographic process. Out of my fieldwork in Tijuana grew a sense of inadequacy toward ethnographic writing. I migrated then from an Anthropology of Art toward a composite practice of Anthropology AND Art. The expressive possibilities I found in this intersection (including explorations through the essay film) resulted in a less secure but mor rewarding experimental work. Installations and the video-essay work have indeed the capacity of pushing ethnography in uncertain directions, via an investment in the endless dialogue between self and other unmoored from fixed modes of representation. In my art practice, ethnography therefore became a trans-media practice that reflects on the border as an unstable and mobile category of experience, of sensory and conceptual mediations, disciplinary negotiations, and geopolitical articulations; a polyvalent set of mediations of volatile affects. These conceptual and evocative interventions are therefore less about documenting or transcribing' the Other, and more about 'installing' turbulent desires and affects in tense disciplinary and geo-political border zones.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a short video art film, ‘Rootless’ which, through installation, poetic and metaphorical devices, interrogates issues concerning tourism, social memory and memorialisation in Cape Town. A ‘skeleton artwork’ was filmed in installations at specific tourist sites in central Cape Town, suggesting scenes such as an archaeological dig, interactions at controversial sites containing slave and Khoe Khoe human remains, and invoking relationships between land, memorialisation and social memory. Such techniques enable the expression of not only the unsayable but the un-visualisable, creating a visual presence to challenge surface presentations, as well as suggesting uncertainties in the present.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents a critical take on a short video art film, 'Rootless' which, through installation, poetic and metaphorical devices, interrogates issues concerning tourism, social memory and memorialisation in Cape Town, South Africa. A life-size 'skeleton artwork' was filmed in installations at specific tourist sites in central Cape Town, suggesting scenes such as an archaeological dig, interactions at controversial sites containing slave and Khoe Khoe human remains, and invoking relationships between land, memorialisation and social memory. The film creates disquietude over the ways in which Cape Town is portrayed and visualised within tourist frameworks, in relation to the reality of the dispossessed and forgotten in Cape Town, the latter to whom it is dedicated. Through the visual metaphor of the skeleton, the observer is both placed as participant of the tourist experience as well as from the perspective of past inhabitants of Cape Town. It was created as a visual experiment, to bring together and visualise research in heritage and Cape Town as a city in transition at the University of the Western Cape, in relation to concerns over land, social memory and memorialisation. The film focuses on sensory impact, using music, poetry, the reversal and slowing of film speed, and stills photographs as well as art installations, to interrogate the present while invoking the past, conjointly distancing and switching positions of subject and observer. Such techniques are argued to enable the expression of not only the unsayable but the un-visualisable within the present, creating a visual presence to challenge surface presentations, as well as suggesting uncertainties in the present.

Paper short abstract:

In 2009 I asked the artistic collective of Alterazioni Video to come with me to the Bamileke chiefdom of Bandjoun (Cameroon). The main topic of our work was the fear, an emotion we have investigated by filming some traditional secret societies masquerades (also using some Hollywood inspired masks), by making an horror movie with a local cast, and using the set and the backstage as an ethnographic field.

Paper long abstract:

Audio-visual media are a powerful vehicle of globalization by means of the creation of widespread mediascapes shaping the imagination and the feelings of the people all around the world. As a consequence the audio-visual media are not only a mean of the anthropological research but a constitutive part of the ethnographic field as well.

It was in this perspective that in 2009 I asked the Italian artistic collective of Alterazioni Video to come with me to the Bamileke chiefdom of Bandjoun (Cameroon), where I usually do my research. The main topic of our work was the fear, an emotion we have investigated by filming some traditional secret societies masquerades (also using some Hollywood inspired masks), by making an horror movie with a local cast, and using the set and the backstage as an ethnographic field. We have tried to stay on the border between facts and fictions, feelings and actors performance, art and anthropology but also to question it. The vampires were the subject of the film, are a part of a shared global imagery but they are also an invisible, effective presence (dium) in local sorcery practices.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the rupture of an encounter with images of the atomic attacks in Hiroshima in an Indian film, Aman (1967) through an enquiry of the popular film aesthetic in terms of sounds, visuals and narrative.

Paper long abstract:

In a rare and moving episode in the 1967 Indian popular film, Aman, a couple visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to a haunting track that begins with a sign of the museum on the door. The woman is the Indian actress, Saira Bainu, playing a Japanese character, Meloda. The man is Dr Gautam Das, played by Rajinder Kumar, who is educated in England and makes a vow to come to Japan to help develop a cure for radiation maladies. A dramatic musical start accompanies their entry into the museum as she points her finger sombrely at a large reproduction of the mushroom-shaped atomic blast. From her indications and his horror-struck gestures, it is clear that this is Das' first visual encounter with reproductions of the atomic blast and its human and environmental damage. There is no conversation, no dubs or voice-overs, only the slow and doleful singing of the well-known playback singer, Mohammad Rafi. The song is a tribute to those who lived in Hiroshima whilst also interpellating the viewers, largely Indian, into empathising with their fate through the use of the lyrical 'we' and visceral registers such as deformed bodies, childless mothers, and cavernous ruins. In this paper I consider this filmic moment of first encounter with the atomic devastation as it is portrayed in the popular film aesthetic, and how it is reproduced through sound, visuals and narrative, with a reappraisal of Kantian ideas of the sublime.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation aims to explore the manners through which Palestinian video artworks expose aspects of the hidden social contradictions of the colonial context in Palestine. It will do this by presenting Sharif Waked's "To Be Continued …". This video, I will claim, tries to expose the contradictory aspects of suicide bombing in Palestine.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most controversial sites of the Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation is suicide bombing, or martyrdom operations. Of the different cultural domains, the Palestinian visual and performing arts are the most systematically engaged in treating the issue of martyrdom operations. In them, there is a constant effort to translate and to reposition the contradictory nature of these resistive forms onto the visually aesthetic horizon. And, by doing so, these artistic works expose certain imperceptible aspects in the realities of resistance that they are, in a way, representing. This presentation will analytically introduce Sharif Waked's "To Be Continued …" (2009), which is a video that engages with Palestinian martyrdom operation. The video is composed of one scene in which a martyrdom operator reads his well before conducting his resistive act. It almost copies literally this genre of video communiqués released after each martyrdom operation to the Palestinian public, and beyond. The only difference is the type of text that is read in Waked's video. The martyrdom operator reads the first story of One Thousand and One Nights. For 41 minutes and 33 seconds the operator reads the story with no stop or change in his position or the background setting.

The introduction will focus on the question of how this video expose/hide the (un)certainties of the realities of martyrdom operations as much as it is an aesthetic formation that displaces it onto a different social domain.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I introduce my concept of Curatorial Work as the labor that creates a passage—often through imperceptible smuggling acts—between a specific historiographic matrix and an affective constellation. Not only a formal synthesis of the essay-film, multi-track installation, cinematic montage, and auto-ethnography, Curatorial Work is also an ethics of dwelling and working-through carefully crafted passages amidst a modernity in ruins. A form of meditation on the formless multi-sensorial datum, on the virtual at the heart of disorderliness, Curatorial Work delivers creative acts in carefully measured doses and relies on a mode of perseverance that emanates from and strives to remain connected to the diagnostic and therapeutic dimension of contemporary life at large. Thus framed, and building on my long-term fieldwork among curatorial laboratories, experimental media and visual cultures in Mexico City, Curatorial Work is cultivated here as an emerging ethics of scholarship that attempts to make palpable the imperceptible side of ethnography, its 'visceral underbelly.' In addition, I will 'curate' as a 10-minute multi-track essay and moving-image meditation on contemporary passages within Mexican modernity.

Paper short abstract:

Neo-Shamanism and its practice is an important topic in contemporary video art from Kirgistan due to the revival of the local indigenius religions after the end of the sovjet regime in 1991. How do artists from Kirgistan interprete the relation between video as an artistic medium and the concept of shamanism and in which terms are the tapes interpreted in international galeries? What lies on the bottom of the decision for the medium video in oder to transport an unsayable experience?

Paper long abstract:

Since the fall of the soviet regime in 1991, followed by revolutions in 2005 and 2010, Kirgistan is still involved in a process of searching for a new political and cultural identity. Hand in hand with the claim for a new kirgisian way of modernity neo-shamanistic practices where revived. In this context a new generation of artist, still affected by the highly traditional soviet education in the Academies of Art broke new ground participating in international biennials like in Venice. The artists adopted themselves rapidly to the concept of contemporary art and are nowadays producing video-clips, installations and concept-art. In my paper I will speak about Shaarbek Amankul an artist from Bishkek who was filming his friends and relatives in their shamanistic healing rituals. One of his works shows the face of a shaman at work, showing the deep expression of pain and compassion during the ritual. A video that then has been shown around the world in the big temples of contemporary art. I will first focus on the relation between the medium video and the understanding of shamanism from the point of view of the artist. In a second step I will show the different terms in which the unsayable of the act has been interpreted in different contexts. The last question would be if Amankuls tapes are to be understood as a concession to the dictate of a western understanding of art or as an autonomous selection of a medium that is disposed to transport the transcendent.

Paper short abstract:

The performances in the ‘Citas por América’ artwork series, based on my attendance of ritual celebrations in the Andean Highlands, result from that brief moment when the work of art reveals the imperceptible, and the challenges of natural cycles of crisis and anxiety.

Paper long abstract:

In all cultures there are customs, rituals and legends that mirror the societies in which they take place. Sky and Earth: the ties between these spaces and times are strange and ambiguous. Nature seems to defeat society. Both peace and danger come from those other spheres parallel to yet different from the human. The past is excessive, dreadful, or too rich. It was either the kingdom of darkness or a place where several suns shone in potent and permanent daytime.

In this context, restlessness sets in and an anxious vision inevitably lurks stealthily. To counteract this, ritual offerings of llamas, alcohol and wine libations are given, and festivities that respect nature are held.

The performances in the 'Citas por América' series are born from my decision to venture into that brief moment when the work of art enables what appears to be invisible or when it reveals the imperceptible.

I attend celebrations and collective offerings bringing wool and soil, materials with vital

energy that form part of natural cycles and of the lives of local residents. My deliberate passage through different situations and geographies places me at the threshold of another awareness.

Symbolic space, spiritual knowledge, condensation of holiness, sign as primary language, ecstasy as visionary and creative means. Though these form part of indigenous spheres of knowledge, they find fertile terrain in the language of contemporary art and they encapsulate the ability to express the unspeakable.

Paper short abstract:

Starting with Marcel Duchamp’s statement about the limits of human observation that “One can look at seeing but one can't hear hearing”, my paper discusses the short film “Hamburg” from the film “Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould” vis-à-vis my anthropological fieldwork on music therapists who employ music listening as therapy.

Paper long abstract:

There is a moment in the short film "Hamburg" from "Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould" (1993) where Gould plays one of his recorded Beethoven performances for an unknown maid in his hotel room. As the Klaviersonate unfolds, the film camera closes up on the maid and we, the film audience, are able to observe the subtle changes in her face. It is an audiovisual, hermeneutic moment where we feel invited to start guessing at what emotions and which personal memories the music produce in the listening woman. Our interpretations can only be uncertain, if not anxious, but nevertheless we are convinced that "something" happens to the woman as we observe her listening to the music.

This "something", an instant of musically induced emotional change in the listening subject, contains valuable knowledge to music therapists who employ the Bonny Method of Guided Imagery of Music (GIM). In my anthropological fieldwork I observe a group of Scandinavian and North-American GIM-therapists who seek to establish a basis for knowing and predicting strong, observable responses to music in the bodies of their listening clients. In my paper I draw on "Hamburg" as well as video artist Bill Viola's work The Passions to shed light on the seemingly imperceptible, yet highly significant moments of my fieldwork. I explain how I as an ethnographer employ the techniques and insights of visual artists in order to "slow down" and, importantly, trust that which I record by my very own eyes and ears in the field.

Paper short abstract:

Videography is a field method that expands ethnographic presence and eases the problem of coevalness by supporting new unified research subjectivity, a self-other that exists in "reflexive time".

Paper long abstract:

For the chronically homeless in North America, avowals of dignity and self-worth are embedded in selective memory and traumatized identities. A major problem faced by ethnographers who study this group is Fabian's (1983) problem of coevalness; instead of looking at a regressive cultural form, street-poverty must be approached as coterminous with other human conditions over time and through space. I studied "homeless" people living in a shanty community in Portland and state-funded housing projects in Toronto over ten years using ethnovideography. I argue that ethnovideography bridges the divide between the research methods of regimes of practice, for which shantytowns are ungovernable anomalies, and radical ethnographies, which reify the shantytown as a trace of the "actioning of needs" by virtuous marginal persons. Both extremes distort coevalness by objectifying a categorical street identity and ignore its construction within the process of investigation. Ethnovideography expands ethnographic presence and addresses coevalness by producing a virtual link between a Bakhtinian once-ocurrent investigative moment and its trace. This reflexive "time-frame" is then more accurately reinterpretable over time than notes and recall. Video is a medium of reflexive performativity; the traditions of observer and observed are re-territorialized in inescapable visualized moments of interpenetration, whereby observer becomes the subject and the object of an ethical ethnography inhering a fidelity of the participants in a once-occurrent-event of being. "Dignity" emerges as an ethical, rather than a purely anthropological issue. (A short film supports this paper)