- Convenors:
-
Blake P Kendall
(HKMW)
Pavel Borecký (University of Bern)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 23 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
In this panel we explore the promise of geopoetics in the realm of visual anthropology and subsequently aim to instigate the formation of a new collaboration / creative collective. How do we create geopoetic films today?
Long Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic invigorated the “bordering regimes” present in Europe with a renewed intensity. What the momentum exposed in glaring light, was a vision of the world in which political borders are mobilised as “immune systems” (Roberto Esposito), that keep biologically and culturally “contagious bodies” at bay, and whereby the nation states gradually drift towards “new nationalism”, promising the protection of public health and the physical survival of the nation (Agamben). These politicised narratives of “movement”, the precarity of systemic collapse, and the concerns of these material threats to life, are the contextualising catalysts, to which we respond.
In this panel we explore the promise of geopoetics in the realm of visual anthropology and subsequently aim to instigate the formation of a new collaboration / creative collective. How do we create geopoetic films today?
Firstly, by aligning ourselves with the project of making the planet a truly meaningful scale, we subscribe to Latourian response to the outdated global/local modus and the nation state as the mediator between the two. Working consciously towards the “immediate realm” of the “terrestrial” (Latour - Back to Earth 2017). By doing so, we want to find routes and thematic connections between field sites on a global scale. We invite researchers and practitioners from all disciplines and diverse backgrounds, to prefigure the creative response to Global Crisis through “terrestrial vision-making”.
This panel is the invitation to collaborate and form creative collectives. We reflect on the significance of the Disappearing World series, and ask if terrestrial narratives of scale, and webs of ethnographically rooted connection were to be re-visited? We believe in the significance of interdisciplinary “contamination” of ideas and practice and we want to treat this panel as the meeting place. With both research findings and aspirations, within the panel we wish to explore and wrestle with the symbiotic entanglements of the terrestrial: life and life as an extension of non-life. How do we make films of the terrestrial? And how do we do it together?
We invite you to join us in vision making.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper introduces the thematic threads of dialogue within the panel, by introducing the key concepts of the session's dialogue, through the ethnographic case studies of the water crisis in Jordan and the Climate Changing futures of Borneo.
Paper long abstract:
How do we connect? The formation of a collaboration holds political weight with its response to neo-liberal individualism, but apart from its ideological connotations, the pragmatic question of collective action's form in the contemporary zeitgeist is held to question. What does it look like? With processes of alienation and commodification as symptoms of the "supermodern", this paper seeks to introduce processes of re-connecting. This paper reflects on the motivations for developing 'Disappearing Worlds' and inviting researchers to collaborate. Key themes such as geopoetics and the Latour's concepts of the terrestrial are expanded upon with examples presented from Jordan and Malaysia. This paper seeks to introduce the key aspects of the panel of presentation, and prepare everyone for the journey ahead.
In the wild space of the imagination, built on contingencies and speculations, one never knows what the future will hold. In the process of collective "vision-making" the only semantic framework to establish is "where do we meet?" We do not know what will come, both with the panel and afterwards. However, what we can attempt to articulate is where we meet. This reflexive presentation, aligns the values of the panel with propositions and invitations for methodological experimentation.
An Invitation.
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation I will expand upon the concept and practice of geological filmmaking, as a means of tackling some of the key perceptual and representational challenges of the ecological crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Geological filmmaking builds on the foundation of existing analyses of media technologies as products of the extraction of geological materials, often at high environmental costs. Building on the geological materiality of the filmic medium, geological filmmaking also considers the formal and temporal intersections of the geologic and the filmic. The key claims of the project are the entangled and reciprocal co-emergence of the socio-economic and the geologic and of our mortal bodies and environments, and that film is able to provide a perceptual framework in which to contemplate these inextricable connections all the way down every scale: from the molecular to the planetary, from the immediate to the stretches of deep time.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reveals a multi-modal music video filming experiment in imagining a "Free Tibet" through a geo-lyrical lens together with Loten Namling, a Tibetan opera singer and composer living in exile.
Paper long abstract:
Namling, a renowned Tibetan opera singer and composer , infuses Tibetan classics with Sufi ballads and rock music. Representing the second generation of Tibetans living in exile, Namling was born in India and has never seen Tibet. In his own words; Namling “lives Tibet” in his imagination.Being engaged in long hours of political conversations with Namling, the author reveals the processes of making the video clips “Tibetan Nomads” and “Tibetan Warriors” as they reflect on Namling’s life long struggle and world view on the “Issue of Tibet” through a geo-lyrical lens. The stages and processes of making the video clips are analysed and mediated in dialogue with the historical evolvement of the Tibetan Freedom Campaign “Free Tibet” (formed in 1987) that is elaborated alongside the visual anthropology debate on “disappearing worlds”. The Tibetan Warriors video is based on an experimental archival montage of the past and present faces of Tibet in temporality, where traditional clothing and transcendental dancing are staged as a form of resistance to the occupation. Tibetan Nomads video starts with Namling (aka the nomad) being lost in the busy and luxurious streets of Zurich to find himself among the humble yak herders of Andermatt in Switzerland. The meeting and instant connection to the Yaks and the Swiss Alps resembling the Himalayas; the Tibetan games, stamp and momo (dumpling) making alongside to chanting traditional rhymes are looked in relation to how “being Tibetan” is lost and then found, performed and manifested. The music videos have gone viral over social media (FB and Instagram, shared by various authors) and created wider debates among the Tibetan transnational political circuits and diaspora in imagining and visioning for a free Tibet.
Tibetan Nomads: https://youtu.be/ML5HKwIjbZ4
Tibetan Warriors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgj86fkSRUY&t=71s
Paper short abstract:
The Encyclopaedia of Images of Fire is a multimedia project at the intersection of art, anthropology and advocacy that casts a glance at the imagery of fire in Western media and across human cultures in an attempt to reinvest the phenomenon with an adequate dose of mythical symbolism.
Paper long abstract:
"Fire is the greatest image, the most complete image of annihilation", stated French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his "Talks on the Poetic Imagination", broadcast by Paris-Inter radio in 1954. But the images of fire, like flowers of language, appear to express the whole gamut of human passions in their conflicts and their ambivalences. And so, "next to such active images of fire, next to images that incite action and violence", he remarks, "we would find images that teach us tranquillity and happiness". Nonetheless, the imagery of fire in contemporary media and arts circuits seem to rest on its destructive power –especially in the last decade, when megafires have become ever more common around the world.
The Encyclopaedia of Images of Fire is a multimedia project at the intersection of art, anthropology and advocacy that casts a glance at the imagery of fire in Western media and across human cultures in an attempt to reinvest the phenomenon with an adequate dose of mythical symbolism. As advances in chemistry and thermodynamics explained away the properties of fire, the phenomenon became progressively depleted of its poetic substance. "Fire shrank from Heracleitean universality to a laboratory demonstration. Once the manifestation of the deity and the source of life, fire had become alien, a destroyer of cities, a savager of soil, a befouler of air" (Pyne 2001:138). We invite artists and scholars to contribute to this project with their artwork, expertise and ideas.