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Paper short abstract

This arts-informed inquiry through Sicilian American cultural memory uses photography to map internal and external tensions of social, political, and cultural boundaries. Creating a framework to examine the evolution of society and politics of immigration in a multicultural 21st Century America.

Paper long abstract

Woven together with black and white medium format photographs, I am creating a personal survey of my family's immigration history and story from Sicily to the United States in the early 20th century through immigrant adaptations of rituals, ceremonies, and the quotidian experiences that have become embedded in modern Sicilian American culture in New York and New Orleans. A Communion of Saints reflects on the nature, transmission, and negotiation of emigrant memories across space and between generations by interweaving portraits of my family, current and past homesteads, vernacular family photographs, domestic documentation, public records, and historical spaces to reflect the layers of experience that accumulate and change as one moves from culture to culture, negotiating movement between communities and the crossing of political boundaries. Some questions that will be considered are: How do immigrants remember their homeland? How do descendants of immigrants "remember" a land they rarely visit? How does diasporic memory pass through families, and how is it represented in cultural forms?

With each showcase or exhibition, I will be presenting clusters of images that can be arranged and rearranged in unique groupings as another layer in telling personal and collective stories of migration and relocation. The decision of the groupings with in the frame will be decided by the exhibition space thus highlighting how personal and larger historical narratives are continually being remade. This project will debut in the form of an exhibition at the American Italian Cultural Center in New Orleans, Louisiana during PhotoNOLA.

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Paper short abstract

This presentation considers black portraiture through the use of social media, cellphones, and digital technology. Through an archive of media-scapes,we analyze moments in which the men in this archive engage with technology to identify,interact with their world as migrants of the African diaspora.

Paper long abstract

This presentation considers black portraiture through the use of social media, cellphones, and digital technology. Through an archive of media-scapes, we listen for moments in which the eight men in this archive engage with technology to identity and interact with their world as migrants of the African diaspora. We present a collage of their voices and experiences to suggest some ways in which technology provides a metaphor for their sense of self and their role in community. For example, Louis uses his Facebook account to legitimize his marriage to an Italian citizen, Noah talks of sharing his cellphone minutes with the other sixty residents in the camp, while Godspower speaks about literally using his cellphone to bait fishermen into calling for a rescue boat while at Sea. A portrait of blackness emerges from their words and our observation of how and why the men use these forms of media. Social media is mapped onto cartographies of connectivity across the black diaspora, thereby not only generating locations of satellite towers and internet nodes but also a collective portrait of diaspora as a category of identity. Tracing the implementation of technology and social media networks creates an archipelagic portrait of a black diaspora.

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Paper short abstract

Approaching squatting activists, this visual anthropology methodology dialogues with the invention of images produced by the field. Its esthetical performativity renders, at times, areas of sensation that open to perceptive schemes exceeding simple captures of discriminate identities.

Paper long abstract

The proposed paper originates from fieldwork on the Berlin Wagenburgen, squatted spaces where groups of Punks and Political Activists still nowadays defend a specific art of experiencing urban geography. Assumed political choices or/and a social necessity, those dwellings of trucks and caravans camp on remaining wastelands, where their everyday life partakes in a culture of sensory experimentations thru rites of passage. But this weltanschauung paradoxically exploits also the resources (health care, unemployment benefits…) of the social contract it is challenging. Such ambiguity induces then each actor to the production of a fictional style (clothes, markings, attitudes…), reflected too in the appearance of the dwellings as extensions of the self, in order to lure, poetically, threats of policing. The liminal nature of this inhabiting at the margin proves a challenge for ethnographical rendering, when visual documentation cannot nurture or emphasize stigma.

This communication introduces a methodology in visual anthropology using the resources of artistic creation in order to share with the field a construction of knowledge, while respecting the ethic of analytic research. Inspired by the experience of a longterm study of intimacies in a participating observation, its diagrammatic esthetic confronts itself to the style soliloquies of the inhabitants, "edged with mist" in a kind of Woolfian literary composition, this time when doing photography dialogues with the inspirational images that the field produces and manipulates itself. Sometimes, those "together experienced" schemes render complex and ambiguous perception modalities of the approached territories, that exceed usual captures of discriminate identities.