Paper short abstract

Based on an analysis of the research and creative work of the contemporary artist aniara rodado and her proposal for a creative partnership with plants, I discuss some of the potential and challenges of the encounter between contemporary art and anthropology.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I discuss the research and creative work of the Colombian contemporary artist aniara rodado and her proposal for a creative partnership with plants that gives rise to "vegetable dances" and a "garden of the end of the world." Analysing primarily the works “Transmutation de base - Alien/migration” (2016), “Notación y Transmisión del Movimiento de una Ruda” (2017), and “Crème pour voler” (2019-2025), and paying attention to a series of experiments and encounters involving humans and non-humans that allowed for the creation of these artworks, as well as the emergence of the idea of “transspecific collaboration” between the artist and some plant species, I discuss the notions of “co-presence”, “shared authorship”, “ethical commitment to non-human beings” and “responsibility”, highlighting the transdisciplinary contaminations and the intense material-semiotic flow between art and science (including anthropology) that animates them. Discussing also my entry into this collaborative endeavour through the realization of my ethnographic research, I argue that from the moment I am invited to collaborate on some of the artist's projects, new creative ventures begin, producing new contaminations, further blurring the boundaries between artistic creation, anthropological research, and world creation, or even between art, science, and politics. Interested in the potential of the encounter between anthropology and contemporary art, I seek to reflect on the following questions: How to articulate artistic and anthropological intentions, methodologies, and projects with ecological concerns? How to produce more-than-human co-creative practices in the encounter between art and anthropology, thus making transdisciplinary projects also transspecific?

Paper short abstract

As contemporary artists have unmoored themselves from producing objects and embraced art as process, the question of what kind of knowledge art produces has again emerged as a concern. This talk explores the epistemic politics of contemporary artistic practice in which process is a central modality.

Paper long abstract

As contemporary artists have continued to unmoor themselves from producing objects and have instead embraced art as a process, the kind of knowledge artists produce has again emerged as a central question. If objects of art were once sites of knowledge, the turn to art as process, which emphasises experimentation, has undermined these epistemic claims. Indeed, in diverging from academic/scientific propositional knowledge, its status remains, at best, ambivalent. This presentation explores the epistemic politics of contemporary artistic practice in which process is an experimental mode. Through a series of conversations with contemporary artists in Yogyakarta, we explore this process as a form of experimentation in which an unfinished quasi-object is presented as an open-ended site for non-knowledge making. It is not that works of art are not able to create knowledge, but rather the knowledge they produce is not the same kind of knowledge as that of the sciences. It is a site, we propose, where we do not know what we do not know, and thus a contestation of knowledge itself. The aim is to interfere with the process of knowledge production itself, and, in turn, create a site for a different kind of knowledge that can co-exist without competing against the academic model of knowledge production (commodified, hierarchical, normalised). What artists put forward is not knowledge in a propositional form, but processes of experimentation that are unfinished and incomplete, and that expose open-ended questions: What is this? What does it want? What do we not know?

Paper short abstract

I examine how artistic practices construct imagined ecosystems in which taste becomes a tool of the politics of care, and how performance can transform eating into an act of responsibility, creating a space for negotiating ameliorative strategies in a time of climate crisis.

Paper long abstract

The paper examines the potential of art to create new relations and spaces of encounter in a world marked by polarization and the climate crisis. Drawing on the concept of “haptic taste as a task” (Perullo 2018), I show how art practices that engage the senses can become both a research method and a tool for repairing relations between people and the environment. Hence, taste is not a firm and permanent predisposition but as a processual phenomenon—a task that all consumers must face and to which they must flexibly respond. Our culinary choices come with moral obligations toward the environment and other beings with which we share living space. The idea of actively tuning in with the environment corresponds to Ingold’s recommendation of an improvisation-based life (2011).

I devote particular attention to the Cooking Sections (Climavore) project, which, through installations, performances, and communal meals, redefines eating as an ethical and ecological gesture. These activities not only visualize the connections between diet and climate but also initiate processes of co-creating knowledge and community.

Analyzing these practices, I argue that art can function as an “infrastructure of care,” opening spaces for dialogue and collaboration where divisions typically prevail. Shared aesthetic and culinary experiences become laboratories of relationality, where alternative models of life emerge—resistant to the logic of exploitation and isolation. The paper contributes to the debate on how art, intertwined in research-creative practices, can not only describe but also transform the conditions of life in the Anthropocene.

Paper short abstract

This presentation looks reflexively back at a shared experience of fieldwork on relations to plants in Ìbàdàn (Nigeria) between Nigerian photographer Ọbáyọmí A. Anthony, French visual artists D. and E. Chevalme and French anthropologist E. Guitard, that led us to an exhibition in 2024 in Nigeria.

Paper long abstract

This presentation offers a reflexive return at a shared experience of fieldwork (« enquête-création », Nova 2021, see also Bationo-Tillon & al. 2024) between Nigerian photographer Ọbáyọmí A. Anthony, French visual artists Delphine & Elodie Chevalme and French anthropologist Emilie Guitard on relations to plants in Ìbàdàn, southwestern Nigeria.

From 2017, as part of the Treebadan research program, then from 2022 within the INFRAPATRI program bringing together researchers (in social sciences and botany) and artists to apprehend attachments to plants in 4 sub-Saharan African cities as an “infra-heritage”, I invited Delphine and Elodie Chevalme and Ọbáyọmí A. Anthony to share my ethnographic fieldwork, at the foot of isolated trees and in the wooded areas of Ìbàdàn. The aim was to combine the classic tools of ethnography (observation, informal exchanges, interviews, ethnoscience methodology) with artistic methods such as in situ drawing and night and documentary photography, to jointly produce "sensitive knowledge" on the daily interactions of Ìbàdàn's city dwellers with plants, and to capture their role in the production of urban atmospheres specific to the city. This long-term collaboration led us to produce and curate jointly a collective exhibition, « Igi’bàdàn. Living With Trees in Ìbàdàn », presented in 2024 at the Alliance Française in Lagos and the University of Ìbàdàn, in Nigeria.

This presentation will take a reflexive look back at these moments of shared fieldwork between French and Nigerian researcher and artists, as well as at the implementation of the exhibition presenting the results of this collaboration.

Paper short abstract

Engaging with Marcus and Myers’s vision of entanglement, the intergenerational Maimonides from Scratch (MfS) workshops in Manchester and Marseille on the meanings of medieval polymath Maimonides, demonstrate how artistic-anthropological work using animation can activate intercommunal imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

Three decades after Marcus and Myers re-theorized the traffic between art and anthropology—that anthropology is critically entangled in art worlds—from our fractured present Maimonides from Scratch (MfS) attempts to harness the function of artistic-anthropological intersections anew as not merely a means to a mode of deeper description but a process with potentiality for intervention into intercommunal polarization. Emerging from a decade of engaged ethnographic fieldwork on Islamo-Jewish or Judeo-Muslim intercommunal relations across urban European contexts, MfS is an experiment in co-creation and being together through animation workshops with primary school students and elderly museum volunteers in Manchester and Marseille. The MfS methodology enables an encounter with the multiple meanings of Maimonides, the medieval polymath, through material engagement with textiles and documents from the multilingual Cairo Genizah, lending deep historical and material context.

MfS reveals the reclamative potentiality of art-anthropology, and its capacity to generate reciprocity in cross-cultural encounter. Rather than representing intercommunal harmony however, the project seeks to (re)activate it, inviting people to inhabit historical moments of intellectual synthesis across religious boundaries, offering tangible evidence that coexistence was and is not inevitable but actively constituted through linguistic and cultural translation. This approach embodies art’s prefigurative potential in community contexts. By treating historical materials alongside and in tandem with aesthetic resources for storytelling both then and now, MfS highlights how critical creative practice can intervene in the affective and epistemological conditions of polarized publics, generating spaces where different communities across generations reimagine alternative relations, political possibilities, and non-standard ontologies.

Paper short abstract

This paper unfolds, both literally through a photographic zine, and conceptually in the paper’s narrative, layers of recording, presentation and representation, of contemporary art and craft practices in Uzbekistan. Reflecting on how experimental community exhibitions can co-create visual archives.

Paper long abstract

Over the last 30 years Uzbekistan has seen a polarised history of state hostility towards some contemporary artists, running in parallel to the government’s enthusiastic adoption of the economic and cultural nation-building potential of ‘traditional craft’. How can an anthropologist’s visual ethnographic interventions - in this case an exploration of the creation of a contemporary photographic archive with art and craft practitioners – be a fruitful avenue for further visual ethnography and collaboration in recording and representing diverse practices.

This paper (presented alongside a photographic zine at the conference) brings together visual case studies of individual art and craft practitioners, presented in pop-up community exhibitions in three art/craft spaces in Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara, alongside community focus group accounts reflecting on the representation, perception and role of photographic images in a local context.

The collaborative and experimental process raised many poignant questions. Is the role of a visual anthropologist inherently extractive? Is the empowerment of local documentarians a more productive use of energy? Is there a need for local dissemination or is an international audience a valid end goal? How does the fundamental role of the outsider-photographer as translator between regimes of practice, justify the inclusion of their personal artistic voice in the composition and selection of works?

This paper unfolds, both literally through a photographic zine, and conceptually in the paper’s narrative, layers of recording, presentation and representation of contemporary art and craft practices in Uzbekistan. Reflecting on how experimental community exhibitions can co-create visual archives.

Paper short abstract

Based on the exhibition Construction, Occupation, this paper proposes exhibition-making as a mode of ‘ethnographic confluence’, showing how art and anthropology can generate embodied, affective knowledge and alternative publics in a polarised world.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on Construction, Occupation, an exhibition that translated long-term ethnographic and curatorial engagement with artists and housing movements in São Paulo into an embodied, spatial encounter in Los Angeles' Fowler Museum. Drawing from research and curatorial work conducted in an occupied building that was subsequently transformed into social housing, the project responds to conditions of political polarisation by foregrounding exhibition-making as 'ethnographic confluence'—a mode of knowledge production in which anthropology and art do not lose their specificity, but gain force through their encounter across space, bodies, and publics. Following quilombola thinker Antônio Bispo dos Santos, confluence here names a meeting that strengthens rather than absorbs difference.

I argue that the exhibition, and the artistic practices it brought together, enabled a different kind of knowledge to take form: one grounded in corporality, empathy, and collectivity, and accessed through shared spatial and affective experience. Art works, the public programme, and the exhibition design recreated and engaged with architectural and material elements of the occupation, inviting visitors to move through and inhabit the rhythms and constraints of collective life in São Paulo. In doing so, the exhibition foregrounded the body as a site of knowledge, making vulnerability, care, and resistance perceptible through proximity and co-presence.

Housing is a polemical issue in Los Angeles, where moral frameworks regulate who is deserving of a home. In this context, the exhibition rejected accusation or didactic critique and, through proximity, conversation, and shared attention, created an affective community that opened unique spaces for relational understanding.

Paper short abstract

This paper addresses polarisation as a force behind caste-based discrimination, intensified by the globally networked Hindu nationalism. It proposes curatorial intervention as a methodological juncture of art and anthropology to investigate conceptual-sensorial modes of anti-caste mobilisation.

Paper long abstract

Caste is a contemporary and global form of hereditary segregation. With ancient roots in South Asian societies, caste has been reinforced by colonialism, relocated and reinvented in the diaspora, and remediated as online content. The polarising effects of caste-based discrimination, casteism, have increased on a transnational scale since Hindu nationalism rose to power in India during 2014. Nonetheless, groups and individuals among the oppressed intensify their interrogations of caste and its intersections with racialisation and patriarchy. Within the art field, Dalits form curatorial collectives constituted as network practices of research and production. While these conceptual-sensorial emergences are delegitimate in the South Asian and South Asian diaspora contexts dominated by brahmins and white westerners, they provide generative alternatives to the success stories of the solo artist, curator or scholar.

This paper will argue for the benefit of studying the existing collaborations between artistic, curatorial and scholarly practices within the Dalit curatorial collectives through art anthropology curating as a single post-disciplinary research field influenced by different training heritages. The proposed methodology curatorial intervention forms a parallel to the collectives it investigates, and it challenges the illegitimacy of the claim to embody transdisciplinary knowledge and experiences of artistic, anthropological and curatorial practices. This position engages with alternatives to polarising effects of casteism as well as of strict disciplinary categorisations, and with ethical and epistemological implications of the researcher’s intervention in anti-caste mobilisations imagining futures of social justice.

Paper short abstract

Based on the Amazonart Project, this paper argues that visibility through the curatorial has become a narrative that has lost its potential. It proposes that shifting towards socially–ecologically engaged curatorial practices can open up stronger possibilities for re-worlding through the curatorial.

Paper long abstract

Curatorship was scarcely addressed in The Traffic in Culture (Marcus and Myers, 1995) as a practice relating art and anthropology. However, the role of curating within anthropology has since become an expanding practice and a growing site of academic reflection. This paper offers a brief overview of this relationship before turning to the Amazonart Project. The project has used curatorship as a methodology of research, relationality, care, and dissemination.

I will reflect on the curatorial approach and public outcomes of Listening to the Voices of the Rivers, an exhibition and community art programme at Newcastle Contemporary Art (2025). Curated with Dr Pinheiro-Dias and Dr Sutcliffe and produced during a period of institutional crisis, the project demonstrates how long-term collaborations enabled the participation of prominent Indigenous artists and fostered multiple forms of connection. The paper considers the exhibition’s pedagogical and community-oriented dimensions, including its dialogue with river initiatives in the Northeast of England and its engagement with schools and rainforest curricula, arguing for a shift from spotlight-driven approaches to more entangled curatorial practices.

I argue that while visibility once functioned as a political strategy within an ongoing unequal art system, it has become a narrative that has lost much of its transformative potential -Amazonian art has gained global attention yet remains distant from sustainable relations. Moving towards collaborative and socially–ecologically engaged curatorial practices can foster stronger relationships with diverse publics and places, opening more meaningful possibilities for re-worlding (Borea, Cozzolino, Flynn, 2025) through anthropology, art and the curatorial.

Paper short abstract

How can art open new relational possibilities in ethnography? This paper presents a chapter from my manuscript showcasing artistic practice in an epistemological mode: rich field sketches of Yangon General Hospital reveal how care and healing are negotiated in the spaces in-between structures.

Paper long abstract

Here, art practice emerges as a way of knowing that complements, complicates, and deepens the ways we come to understand, critique, and re‑imagine the world around us. Presenting a chapter from my manuscript, I offer of a two-tired discussion: the promise of artistic practice as more than a methodology and the question of how to publish and present multimodal work.

To do so, I will show an intimate ethnography of daily life on Yangon General Hospital’s downtown campus. Rich artistic reproductions of field‑sketches will transport the audience into the hospital’s interstitial spaces where care and healing are constantly negotiated and “in‑betweenness” becomes institutionalised.

Working from a position of in‑betweenness (anthropology, architecture, art), I employed an experimental methodology that coalesces art practice with classic ethnographic inquiry: participant/observant‑participant observation, archival research, and interviews. This concrete example shows how this innovative mode of what I call artful ethnography functions in practice, answering decade‑old calls from feminist, anti‑colonial, and Indigenous scholars for knowledge production that is more than textual and more than visual. It also responds to contemporary questions about how ethnographic methods can meaningfully follow the affective turn, at a moment when the next generation of anthropologists seek alternatives to the dominance of texts.

This presentation gestures toward the complexity of institutions without collapsing into simple explanation, illustrating how art practice generates new relational possibilities in a polarized world.

In addition to a ppt presentation, I could install (parts) of my Hospital Echoes installation; a spatial argument on interstitiality at Yangon General Hospital.

Paper short abstract

During a communal art happening, organised around a Finnish reception centre, I explored how artistic practices can intervene in polarised local contexts. Through children’s art and embodied co-presence, the event momentarily reconfigured relations, visibility, and possibilities for co-existence.

Paper long abstract

In this paper I explore how a communal art happening functioned as an ethnographic intervention in a context shaped by latent polarisation around a Finnish reception centre. Based on four months of ethnographic fieldwork in a central accommodation unit located in a socio-economically marginalised town, I focus on a participatory art event that I organised in collaboration with reception centre staff, local businesses, and municipal actors.

Initially I thought the event, which centered on children and families painting on the pavement surrounding the centre, to be a way to facilitate encounters between residents of the centre and families living in the surrounding neighborhood. Only later did it become clear to me that the site was marked by long-standing tensions related to anti-immigration discourse, safety concerns, and the symbolic positioning of asylum seekers within the town.

By foregrounding children’s artistic practices and everyday materialities, such as paint, bubbles, and shared food, the event made visible the reception centre, its residents, and their everyday lives. While participation from local families remained limited, reactions from passersby and subsequent engagements revealed shifts in affective atmospheres and possibilities for recognition. The continuation of painting activities with resident families further blurred the boundaries between research, participation, and care, opening spaces for ethnographic knowledge-making grounded in doing together rather than speaking.

I argue that art–anthropology entanglements can generate fragile but meaningful moments of co-existence in polarised settings. I also ponder critically the limits and unsustainability of creative and artistic interventions within these specific institutional contexts.

Paper short abstract

This paper discusses street art in Comuna 13 of Medellín, Colombia, as a collective process through which artists and residents have created a space of encounter to reimagine social relationships and reinforce the unity of a community fragmented by armed conflict.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I examine street art in Comuna 13 of Medellín, Colombia, as a collective creative process through which artists and residents have forged a space of encounter to reimagine social relationships and reinforce the unity of a community fragmented by decades of armed conflict. Comuna 13 stands as one of the most emblematic sites of Colombia’s internal armed conflict and the subsequent peacebuilding efforts. After years of violence, by the mid-2010s, the comuna transformed into one of the city’s most visited and safest tourist destinations. This transformation is partly attributed to the street art that emerged in its public spaces. Building on this foundation, residents developed the Graffitour—a walking tour that narrates the comuna’s complex history to visitors through street art. Street art, laying the groundwork for the Graffitour, has facilitated spaces of encounter and dialogue among artists, residents, guides, and tourists, mediating the establishment and consolidation of social bonds. Moreover, the Graffitour has fostered the ethnographic encounter, enabling me to co-produce knowledge with participants through street art. In light of this, street art in Comuna 13 can be understood as a practice of relational art (Bourriaud 2002)—an art form that foregrounds human interactions and their social contexts, rather than asserting an autonomous and private symbolic space (Sansi and Strathern 2016).

Paper short abstract

Ulaanbaatar demands anthropologists and artists alike to deal with the burn of modernism it has borne and the post-socialist contradictions it carries and inflicts upon its inhabitants. Art and anthropology rupture such 'crises ordinary' to generate moments of crisis and, thus, vital creativity.

Paper long abstract

Intellectual synergies and problems shared by contemporary art and anthropology run much deeper than the ethnographic turn in art and the creative turn in anthropology. More fundamental, I argue, is the problem of critique that rests in an awkward and oblique relationship to both art and anthropology. Whereas contemporary art seeks to expand accepted forms of expression and imagination, contemporary anthropology seeks to multiply accepted ways of describing and explaining human being-in-the-world. Professional and, thus, institutionalised practitioners of both disciplines aspire to be 'critical' yet remain caught in the discipline of neoliberal 'creativity'.

Post-socialist Ulaanbaatar—caught between romanticised dreams of progress, persistent faith in development, and snowballing neoliberal destruction—demands anthropologists and artists alike to deal with the burn of modernism it has borne, and the everyday contradictions it carries and inflicts upon its residents, tourists, artists, and ragpickers. Despite scholarly diagnosis of a 'crisis ordinary' (Berlant), Ulaanbaatar people remain surprisingly optimistic. Many trust that 'art will change this country one day'. This paper will discuss key 'moments of crisis' in the social life of Ulaanbaatar artists when conflicts erupt and friends confront one another. It is precisely in these moments of crisis—and intensified intersubjective spacetimes (Munn)—when people succeed in moving one another's 'heart-mind' (setgel). Movements of the 'setgel', I argue, is ultimately what art and anthropology both seek, for the sake of crisis and, therefore, the practical, experimental, and circumstantially activist creativity to rupture crises ordinary and regenerate life.

Paper short abstract

This paper reflects on the ways in which a documentary can inform and expand ethnographic research across time, space, and alternative publics, taking as a case study the documentary "Los sueños que compartimos", which traces transatlantic resonances between activist groups in Europe and Mexico.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the extension of ethnographic inquiry through artistic means, focusing on the circulation of the documentary Los sueños que compartimos (The Dreams We Shared) by Valentina Leduc Navarro in pedagogical and activist spaces. The film retraces the journey of a Zapatista delegation across Europe in 2021, connecting with other “struggles for life” and showing how ecological struggles resonate and support one another across geographical contexts.

The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork during the film’s production in Mexico (2021) and on its circulation in France (2025) in educational and activist settings. The paper argues that research combining artistic and ethnographic practices contributes to producing public arenas, as conceptualized in pragmatic sociology (Dewey; Cefaï; Zask). These arenas are not mere sites of research visibility but spaces of collective experimentation where cooperation, conflict, and politicization unfold.

Rather than existing outside the inquiry, the film’s making and circulation constitute moments of knowledge production, reconfiguring the temporalities, spatialities, and publics of ethnography. Through the interplay of production, circulation, and fieldwork, these public arenas extend the creation of commons, civic engagement, and new social ecologies already present in artistic and activist practices.

This paper thus reflects on how filmmaking can expand modes of political fabrication, challenging conventional boundaries of ethnographic inquiry and rethinking the anthropologist’s position within the field.