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- Convenor:
-
Orly Orbach
(British Museum)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Movement
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 15 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This exhibition asks how the anticipation of place is visualised and inhabited in different locals. And how do such images inform spatial practices, heritage production, modes of sociality and relationships to material environments? You can see the exhibition here https://www.therai.org.uk/conferences/anthropology-and-geography/the-anticipation-of-place
Long Abstract:
Recent ethnographic work on migration has opened up news ways of understanding 'waiting subjects' (Dattatreyan 2015) and 'paused subjects' (Elliot 2016) for whom anticipation of place has become integrated into the experience of the everyday. This exhibition aims to build on these works and 'widen' the field, imaginatively and geographically, to examine how the anticipation of places can be understood in different migration contexts, in urban planning, and in other radically changing or seemingly static landscapes. Submissions that reveal the image-making processes and the role of the researcher in their production are especially welcome.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a round-table discussion: 'how is the anticipation of place conceived and visualised, what do these images reveal about the lived experience of those waiting to become part of its future, or those who may be left behind?'
Submissions should reveal new perspectives on the anticipation of place, as imagined locally or remotely, and can include documentation of prints, maps, paintings, drawings, photographs and moving image. Still images should be submitted as high-res digital files, no originals, and films up to one-minute long. Captions and one-page abstract to accompany the images to explain what places are being represent and how the images were produce. Each image should be credited and dated. Permission should be sought from the person submitting.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 15 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This contribution intends to share reflections and ethnographic examples emerging from participatory animation used in collaboration with Egyptian migrants to explore how imaginative anticipation of places and events was crucial in (in)forming experiences of illegalised mobility across borders.
Paper long abstract:
Existential immobility, using Ghassan Hage's terms, is a condition that encourages people to imagine themselves elsewhere, and in the future. Having carried out research with three Egyptian men who crossed the Mediterranean Sea illegally to reach Italy, my contribution to this roundtable intends to reflect on how the anticipation of place is (in)formed imaginatively and socially, before and during the crossing, and how it relates to the following experience of being 'in' the imagined places. The research used participatory animation as a way to explore imagination and engage research participants in a creative and collaborative research. The animated ethnographic examples I will share with the panel, explore ways in which my participants' memory and experience of moving across borders is created by the interdependent relationship between reality and the imagination of what lies beyond the horizon (Crapanzano 2014).
Paper short abstract:
These photos were taken over 20 years ago by a life-long resident of Poplar, east London on a walk around his neighbourhood. He photographed ordinary things which, in the context of the current comprehensive redevelopment of his estate, evoke his conflicting feelings about the changes taking place.
Paper long abstract:
Over 20 years ago, James Watters - a life long resident of Poplar, east London - took a walk around his local neighbourhood with a disposable camera. He took photos of some of the things he came across: a crumbling brick wall one side of a railway bridge; an abandoned motorcycle in the middle of the path; graffiti memorialising the Beatles on the back of a utilities shed; one of the gas holders of the Leven Road gas works. Ordinary things, which with the passing of time have acquired additional significance. "I wish I'd taken more now."
The abandoned motorcycle - "motorcycle in repose" - is his favourite: "something's been discarded and not cared for, just like the neighbourhood was back then." Today meanwhile, the estate is in the process of a comprehensive redevelopment or 'regeneration', with the phased demolition of most of the pre-existing social housing and its replacement with a larger, mixed tenure development renamed 'Aberfeldy Village'.
The image evokes James' conflicting feelings about the changes taking place. No-one wants to live in a place that is "discarded and not cared for" but the new development doesn't sit quite right with him either. Everything has been cleaned up, but who is it really for? "Even when I walk through it I feel like I have to walk in a straight line... There's something precious about someone chucking a motorbike on the ground and just saying - 'fuck it'."
Paper short abstract:
This submission presents a short video that explores the anticipation of a future 'regenerated' London. It uses Google Street View imagery to explore the temporal dimension to changing urban environments questioning how demolition and regeneration is felt for those inhabiting this landscape.
Paper long abstract:
The video is produced as part of wider doctoral visual ethnographic research exploring the production and experience of place in a super-diverse neighbourhood in north-east London. This video focuses on changing place in regenerating housing estates in the neighbourhood. It uses screen capture to explore an anomaly of Google Street View in which the viewer is transported through time to old streets that cannot be re-filmed due to development hoardings. The video presents the environmental changes wrought by regeneration made visible through inaccessible streets, evoking the importance of the estate's buildings in shaping perspective and horizons. The video questions the affective dimensions of changing material landscapes and the ambivalence of these changes for the local residents.
Paper short abstract:
Supplementary schools are set up by migrant communities whose children are raised in the UK. Through poetry and performances children inhabit their parents countries of origin, which continue to reside in children's imaginations.
Paper long abstract:
My research focuses on supplementary schools set up by migrant communities and their collaborative works with the Museum of London. A mixed curriculum with an emphasis on mother-tongue language lessons, storytelling and performances becomes a tangible and personal way for children to connect with their parents' countries of origin.
The case studies are of London-based Albanian, Tamil, Lithuanian, Iranian and Brazilian supplementary schools that occupy and rent State school classrooms over the weekend, and perform in museum festivals. Looking at school rehearsals, I examine how children remember their parents' places of origin post migration, how these places are reconstructed through language and mythology, how children's performances revise geographies, and finally, how performing becomes a route through which new and old places are revisited.
Observational drawings and films of children's rehearsals point to how "the body itself serves as a field of localization" (Merleau-Ponty) and the ways in which children as actors generate space and continually adjust their positions (Johnstone 2007). In performances,
Children visualise distant pasts and their immediate futures, in what Sennet terms 'prehension', as movements in which the body anticipates and acts in advance of sense data (2008). Heritage becomes a site of play where children reinterpret traditional roles and improvise new cultural forms, remembering, anticipating and reconstructing places through their embodied moving representations.
With multiple place-attachments the children remain aware of their parents' past and connected to different countries, developing their local and transnational identities and keeping their futures open.