Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to discuss the artistic and ethnographic material developed by the Family Stronger Project (www.familiastronger.com) carried out by the anthropologist and artist Vitor Grunvald and Paulo Mendel, an artist and director engaged in audiovisual possibilities in multiple medium.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2016, Vitor Grunvald, trained artist and anthropologist, and Paulo Mendel, artist and video director, have been developing multimodal material out of a fieldwork conducted with Family Stronger, a LGBTQIA+ collective of Sao Paulo (Brazil)'s periphery.

Besides traditional ethnographic written texts, the outcomes of this documentary of transmedia storytelling have multiple forms that cut across the disciplinary fields of art and anthropology. So far, we developed a webdoc (www.familiastronger.com) composed by videoportraits, photographs, digital diagrams and a blog fed by members of the family. Also a short documentary called Sunday which have itself two forms of presentation: as a mono-channel film (screened in the RAI Film Festival 2019 - https://raifilm.org.uk/programme-2019/sunday/) and as a videoinstallation (selected by the curators and presented at

21st Sesc_Videobrasil Biennial - www.bienalsescvideobrasil.org.br/artista/paulo-mendel-vitor-grunvald, one of the most important art events in Brazil).

In this presentation, I aim to discuss the vicissitudes of conducting an anthropological informed work that is both ethnographic and artistic, emphasizing collaborative practices and the challenges of reception that this kind of material presents facing some traditional definitions of art and anthropology.