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Paper short abstract

Our talk will focus on our experience as codirectors of the film "Fire in the Mud," our current film project in the south of Guinea-Bissau. We will discuss our different backgrounds, mostly in anthropology and visual arts, and how our collaboration is changing our methods of ethnographic research.

Paper long abstract

Our talk will focus on our experience as codirectors of the film "Fire in the Mud," our current film project located in a Balanta village in the south of Guinea-Bissau called Unal. During the 1963-74 war, Unal stood between the territories controlled by the Portuguese army and the liberation movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde. We aim to discuss our backgrounds in anthropology, visual arts, psychology, and cinema. Additionally, we will reflect on how our current collaboration changed our methods of ethnographic research both in a scientific and artistic sense towards ideas of anthropological "creativity" that challenges notions of artistic and scientific production. In this line of inquiry, we will question the figure of the artist as belonging solely to the art world, and the figure of the scientist as a non-empathic professional. Recurring to our shared ethnographic experience in Unal, we will try to elaborate on the juxtaposition of the artist who collects affects and the scientist who struggles to collect "non-biased" data.