Paper short abstract:

Moving from different positionalities and disciplines, the paper elaborates on ethnographic and performative methodologies of co-creation, exploring the possibilities and challenges multimodal compositions and claiming for ‘indiscipline’ and baroque knowledge making.

Paper long abstract:

In between collective creative work and academic research, our collaboration started in 2017. From different positionalities and disciplines – as an Italian anthropologist, a Mapuche theatre director and performer, and a Mapuche historian - we addressed indigenous urban diaspora through collaborative multimedia and multimodal methods involving artists and activists.

With the elaboration of decolonial epistemologies and aesthetics, the MapsUrbe project resulted in artistic representations (art exhibition and performance) and the writing of a book in co-authorship with the research participants. This process has prompted us to redefine both our roles - as ethnographers, artists, curators, activists – and changing relationship throughout the different phases of the project. Especially significant has been the production of audio-visual and textual compositions, entailing an extensive process of review/feedback/translation; as well as shifts back and forth collective and individual creation and writing. Including the key issues of authorship, positionality, and curation, the afterlife of our original research has taken a life of its own, expanding into new partnerships and projects and still shaping our unfolding dialogue.

Moving from a first, heated discussion on a bus in Santiago’s rush hour, the paper critically elaborates on methodologies and epistemologies of co-creation, exploring multi-vocal representations, collaborative writing and the possibilities and challenges of a layered authorship. Coming from different disciplinary perspectives, we claim for ‘indiscipline’ - rather than interdisciplinarity - and for a making of knowledge that engages with the motley and the ‘baroque’ (Rivera Cusicanqui 2018; Echeverría 2010) as crucial practices of commoning in multimodal research.