Paper short abstract:

Beyond abstraction and homogenisation, this presentation reflects on three collective multimodal projects that seek to attend to and transpose the polysemy of our lived world through reassemblage, that is, the exploration of resonances and frictions between methods, mediums and genres.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology and relates disciplines have historically strived to tell a single, often textual story and create a dialogue among ‘us’ about ‘them’. Decentering such prerogatives requires close attention to and a transposition of the polysemy of the lived world. This bears the questions: how can we bring different (collective) methods into correspondence with each other? And how can we fragment different representational forms such as text and image and reconfigure their hierarchical relation?

In this textual-audio/visual presentation, I reflect on three collective multimodal projects that explore principles of reassemblage, that is, resonances and frictions between methods, mediums and genres. Such reassemblage embraces multivocality not as parallelism but as undoing boundaries to evoke sensuality and imagination; reflexivity and critique.

A performative reading together with the Senegalese poet Issa Sarr Damaan combined video and text alternating in two languages. As a ‘dialogue with gaps’, it highlighted the partiality of translation and questioned the dominance of (predicative) knowledge from the Global North.

A forthcoming graphic novel together with the Senegalese digital visual artist Pamplumus combines text with drawings and photos. This mixed media approach mobilises the productive friction between the fictional and the documentary for postcolonial reflexivity and the sensuous imagination of possible deltaic futures.

Finally, the forthcoming short film ‘Mollusc Lifeworlds’ builds on collective filming with delta dwellers. It forges a patterned confrontation of (un)likely human and more-than-human perspectives that seek to both evoke a speculative multispecies sensuality and a critical reflection on Eurocentric perception and narrativity.