Paper short abstract:

Disruptions in the experience of time seem nowadays ubiquitous. In order to analyse challenges regarding people's arrhythmical everyday lives, phenomenology may ethically encompass theoretical insights on 'time as lived', its research by means of observational cinema, and embodied spectatorship.

Paper long abstract:

In our fast-paced world, disruptions in the experience of time seem ubiquitous, putting temporalities remarkably at stake. In order to analyse challenges faced by people regarding the disrupted temporalities of their everyday life, observational film has the capacity not to merely (re)present temporalities but to allow us to 'live through' them and, equally important, to simultaneously address the emotive, embodied and material aspects of those arrhythmic disturbances. For that purpose, this communication not only foregrounds the role phenomenology has played in the development of visual/sensory anthropologies together with their specific set of visual and aural fieldwork methods. More significantly, this paper argues that the sedimentation of epistemologies and ontologies coming from phenomenology offers new insightful modes of understanding our rhythmical or arrhythmical being-in-the-world. Having gone unnoticed for long, this crucial dimension of Being, namely our temporalities, take place in my investigation in a unique locus: the irrigated desert of Monegros, North-West of Spain. Its singularity stems not only from being the largest irrigation ground in Western Europe but, also, because its landscape has been dwelled for centuries before the 'man-made' advent of water. The filmic examination of the everyday rhythms of water from a sensory, rhythmical and bodily perspective can provide the spectator access to the affective everyday relationship of Monegros people to water. In so doing, phenomenology may well be able to thread a structure encompassing theoretical insights on 'time as lived', the practice of observational cinema as a research method, and the embodied reception by the spectator.