Paper short abstract:

Since the end of the internal armed conflict, a group of self-taught filmmakers have taken up cameras to tell their stories of violence and conflict in the Peruvian Andes. This paper argues that cinema from the Andes resists contemporary memory regimes and allows for reimagining alternative futures.

Paper long abstract:

Corruption, gang violence, and organized crime have fueled a general distrust in politicians and state authorities in the Peruvian Andes since the end of the internal armed conflict (1980-2000). As a response, a group of self-taught filmmakers from Ayacucho have taken up cameras to tell their own stories of violence and conflict in the region. These films provide a highly critical, if not radical, social commentary on the country's ruling elite and its official narratives of conflicted pasts. Fiction here has the role of narrating truth and delivering justice that is otherwise unobtainable. In this paper, I argue that cinema from the Andes is a form of doing memory politics that resists contemporary memory regimes and allows for reimagining alternative futures.

Paper short abstract:

An ongoing interdisciplinary practice-based research project which aims to investigate the perception and imaginary - about their present and their future - of children living in a condition of imprisonment, using immersive storytelling alongside traditional anthropological filmmaking.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016 I produced an observational documentary film on mothers in prison with their children. I confronted the limits of the observational approach in such a sensitive context as the jail.

I'd like to present some clips of this film and a treatment of a new project which will use new VR 360° technologies, in order to produce a new experimental film, combining ethnofiction and animation.

The intent is to investigate how the transition between different approaches and media can create new form of languages and experiences, and which are the potentialities and the novelty of immersive storytelling applied to visual anthropology. I plan to produce a VR film inside the prison in collaboration with mothers and children in order to understand with them their perspective about their present and future confinement lives.

Children have an innate ability to find shelter in imagination, and this is part of their positive resilience. How do they perceive the place where they are, how do imagine their future?

Employing participatory creative practices adapted to virtual reality, the aims it to reflect about the imaginary related to the power relations within the prison.

The project will analyse if the specific affordances of immersive documentary, such as the 'precence' and the feeling 'to be there', might change the role of the viewer and the film, shifting from representation toward an immersive experience of it, a kind of future wave in storytelling, also anthropological.

Paper short abstract:

How are popular religious practices in contemporary tarantism re-invented as potential cultural, political and economic resources of future-making? What role does the remediation of ethnographic imagery of the past play in these processes? How are ethnographic images reappropriated and remediated?

Paper long abstract:

Apulian Tarantism as a particular form of music therapy has always been used as a strategy to cope with individual as well as collective crises and insecurities, especially in times of social change and instability. In our paper we seek to explore the promises and aspirations related to the re-invention of tarantism as potential cultural, political and economic resource in contemporary Apulia, Southern Italy. During the last decade, interest in tarantism has increased exponentially. Encouraged by local cultural institutions and curatorial residency programs, the former religious healing practice has become a multi-media event re-appropriated by local actors such as the Club UNESCO, neo-tarantate as well as the transnational music and art scene. Especially in the art world there is a downright hype surrounding tarantism, including internationally held workshops, performances and concerts. Once (mis-)conceived as a localised psychopathology, the phenomenon has recently been recontextualised as a form of resistance or rebellion in the much wider political framework of colonial and patriarchal oppression.

The main focus of our paper lies on the important role of (re)-mediation of ethnographic imagery of the past in this process of transformation and re-imagination. How do local actors and transnational artists make use of archival sound and image material of tarantism? And how do these images shape the perception of the past? Drawing on our own audio-visual material as well as documentation of recent artistic (re-)appropriatioons, we explore the various media technologies that are used to evoke a new vision of tarantism as practices of future-making.

Paper short abstract:

Building upon an analysis of how a subset of audiovisual treatments of fire foster a culture of fear that hinders public approbation of prescribed burning techniques, this paper makes the case for embracing anomaly as a paradigm for crafting films addressing fact-resistant beliefs and assumptions.

Paper long abstract:

As American environmental scholar William Cronon put it, fire is "a profoundly double-edged symbol both of our Promethean power to control the Earth… and of the frustratingly unexpected limits we repeatedly encounter in our exercise of that power" (2001:xiv). In the face of ambiguity, people differentiate between a good and a bad fire based on 'provisional prototypes' fashioned after 'best exemplars' of what constitutes each one (Bloch, 1991). An analysis of the contemporary media landscape reveals that a subset of audiovisual treatments of fire is either designed to construe forest fires of all kinds as hostile forces to be feared and contained, or do so unwillingly. The culture of fear fostered by these accounts hinders public approbation of prescribed burning techniques -regardless of their demonstrable adequacy as wildfire preventers- precluding, by extension, their full crystallisation as policies.

Since the future of environmental management must incorporate prescribed burning to its wildfire prevention toolkit, the assumption that forest fires are invariably bad must be dismantled. Beliefs and assumptions rooted in extreme emotions are extremely fact-resistant, and this paper makes the case for embracing anomaly as a paradigm for crafting films addressing them. For French philosopher Georges Canguilhem (1966), the emergence of the anomaly destabilises the uniformity of events that are commonly recognized and accepted by adding to them a phenomenon that is qualitatively different and, while improbable, certainly possible. Ultimately, we advance a theoretical and methodological framework for crafting the unusual and destabilising moving image-based experiences we call anthropological cinemas.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation revisits and discusses filmic approaches and formats experimented with during fieldwork on future-making in the Kenyan Rift Valley.

Paper long abstract:

The Kenyan Rift Valley has been a destination for internal migrants in search for labour in the tourism sector, fisheries, as well the international cut-flower and horticultural companies for some decades now. In the course of changing industries, job-seekers and their descendants have had to adjust and adapt their skills almost continuously.

However, in processes of ruination, as for example the decreased tourism industry at Lake Baringo, or a shut-down flower farm in Naivasha, a large community suddenly finds itself in the situation of needing to relearn specific skills in order to make a living otherwise. In this presentation, I will revisit methods and approaches I have employed in order to find a way of accompanying these processes audio-visually. Furthermore, I will discuss a collaboration with a professional cameraperson in which we have sought formats and styles which render visible the context of collapsing industries, while at the same time focusing on individual stories.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses an authored video-essay addressing the uncertain plight of a refugee camp and of its inhabitants. With ethical dilemmas and academic constraints in mind, it further inquires how theoretical concepts can be rendered intelligible through cinematic stylistic features and techniques

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the possibilities of film in depicting the present and future of a refugee camp and of its dwellers. It will examine the uncertain plight of the Meheba Refugee Camp (Zambia), as well as the expectations and hopes of those who inhabit it. Endlessly stuck in the emergency, this condition evokes a future that is always yet to come. The camp is a place of suspended time.

The paper will also address the ethical dilemmas and academic constraints encountered while conducting fieldwork and seeking to depict contexts of vulnerability. How to restore the dignity and move beyond stereotypical representations of disenfranchised populations is key in such endeavor. The presentation will further inquire how theoretical concepts can be rendered intelligible through cinematic stylistic features and techniques. The screening of short clips from an authored video-essay - "Withering Refuge", will motivate the discussion.

"Withering Refuge" is an audiovisual essay crafted with photographs, audio and film clips collected in three different periods of fieldwork in Zambia, using different devices (mobile phone, digital photo camera, video camera, 35mm photo-camera) and includes voice-over narration. The narrator embodies a fictive Angolan refugee whose voice conducts the viewer through the spaces, expectations and challenges of many of those affected by forced displacement, environmental change, developmental and extractive endeavors. The narration condenses the views and testimonies shared by many of my interlocutors in and around the camp.

Paper short abstract:

In my research about inhabitants' adaptability while facing summer heat waves, I got inspired by the field of sensory anthropology to try to involve medium such as film in order to mingle inhabitants' impressions, sensations and thought about the future of urban life in the climate change context.

Paper long abstract:

After several audiovisual projects related to anthropological research, my current PhD raises the question of how it is possible to work with film and sound, in order to share experiences of inhabitants about the future and the climate changes in urban context.

My PhD research is about inhabitants' adaptability during their mobility (specifically walking travels) while facing summer heat waves in Lyon (France) and Madrid (Spain). My methodology is based on video elicitation interviews including virtual reality helmet and binaural (360°) sound. I also pursue the idea, inspired by the works of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, to produce a film about the extreme heat in urban context and how inhabitants of these cities project themselves into less and less livable cities. In such context, how film and sound can raise sensory experiences, enhancing « secondary impressions » (D. MacDougall) or « haptic feelings » (L. Marks).

During this session, I will show some abstracts of filmed results from the video elicitation method and film's rushes that are intended to share the experience of walking through heat waves in a newborn neighborhood of the city of Lyon during the summer. It will be an opportunity to discuss how audiovisual materials can be a way to share the thoughts and the feelings of citizens around a shared experience of heat, as the end of July in Lisbon may be.

Video presentation : https://vimeo.com/436234383/ccc941a5b8