Film short abstract:

The film tells the story of three music groups based in Granada, Spain, who accept the challenge of the ethnographer-filmmaker of producing each one a videoclip of 'neoandalusí' music. Not a conventional one, but an auto-reflexive, ethnographically grounded music video.

Film long abstract:

Videomusicking Al Ándalus is a sort of making-of film of three participatory ‘neoandalusí’ music videos. It arose from the need to experiment with ‘ethnographically-grounded music videos’, a specific methodological approach that I developed as part of a postdoctoral project (Ranocchiari & Giorgianni, 2018, 2020; Ranocchiari & Romero, 2023). The film tells the story of three music bands that have different relationships with the oriental/orientalist imaginary that permeates the city of Granada, and that accepted the challenge of making an ethnographically-grounded music video. The three videos that we made together represent different collaborative experiences of research-creation that are, however, comparable, and that correspond, on one side, to my project’s epistemological/methodological restlessness; on the other, to the need that we had of understanding better Granada’s contemporary ‘neoandalusí’ music scene. If our challenge with the videos was trying to ‘translate’ or ‘re-interpret’ a very concrete musical discourse to the visual, the aims of this film were to show how co-creative methods can help ethnographers to understand aspects of musicking (Small, 1998) that could not emerge working only with conventional methods; and to show a possible way to open the ethnographic knowledge construction process to the people we are working with.