- Convenor:
-
Anne Huffschmid
(Freie Universität Berlin)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 21 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
The panel discusses audiovisual and artistic approaches to vulnerability and crisis in settings such as Syria, Mexico and Guatemala. It seeks to relate experiences and ideas on aesthetical and methodological strategies as well as challenges such as how to deal with distance or the unseeable.
Long Abstract:
Departing from a recent experience in exploring and narrating "forensic landscapes" the panel gathers audiovisual and artistic approaches to a variety of crisis from contrasting settings such as Syria, Mexico or Guatemala. It seeks to relate experiences and reflections on aesthetical strategies, narrative and methodological innovations as well as challenges such as how to deal with distance or the unseeable.
Audiovisual field research in hyper-violent settings, as in contemporary Mexico with an escalated violence crisis in the last decade, has already undergone significant changes. These refer both to accessing and exploring the unpredictable and opaque terrain of ongoing mass violence, without endangering agents and collaborators, as well as to constructing image-based narratives without reproducing the visual discourses of dehumanization. The current pandemic takes us one step further, forcing us to reinvent research methodologies 'at a distance', dealing with unpredictability and elaborating complex stories at the threshold of life and death, without falling prey to science aesthetics or apocalyptic temptations.
What lessons may we draw from dealing with the limbo of forced disappearance, how may we expand our ways of telling towards experimental methodologies and narratives? How to deal with existential threats, everyday life and survival strategies in terms of collaboration? How to conceive and create critical and mobile archives as narrative resources? How to rely on sensory methods when confronted with restrictions for our senses? The panel looks forward to a vivid discussion on how to produce sense-making narratives in fields of existential threat and apparent senselessness.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Yasmin Fedda (Queen Mary University London)
Paper short abstract:
An illustrated presentation exploring the making of, and strategies around distribution during the pandemic, of the documentary film Ayouni – (Dir Yasmin Fedda, 2020) on forcible disappearance in Syria.
Paper long abstract:
An illustrated presentation exploring the making of the documentary film Ayouni – (Dir Yasmin Fedda, 2020) on forcible disappearance in Syria. Using and unearthing a variety of source materials, spanning 15 years, from 4K footage, mini DV, phone footage, and online archives. The process of making this film reflects how you deal with a violence that cannot be seen nor touched and that is purposefully hidden. What can film do with real violence – forced disappearance – when it permeates deeply? When you try to film a reality, it can mutate, it can change as you try to understand it. The effects of the violence of forced disappearance are messy, and so is its onscreen version. In 2011 Bassel Safadi was a successful open source developer and hacker in Damascus. Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, was a well-known priest based in Mar Musa monastery. Both active in the revolution in 2011, they were witnesses to crimes and aggression before they were forcibly disappeared. The film charts both their stories, alongside those of human rights lawyer Noura Ghazi Safadi, wife of Bassel, and Paolo’s sister Machi Dall’Oglio, as they search for answers. With no information to anchor their limbo, hope is the only thing they can hold on to. This paper will reflect on the processes of research, archive, film practice, and the attempts to use film as a way to keep those disappeared present, and the strategies for releasing this film with impact aims during the pandemic of 2020.
Carlos Flores (Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos, México)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the role of community video within a landscape of violent crime addressed through ritualised practices of indigenous law and theorises how my own collaborative project has engaged these situations by helping to articulate audio-visual narratives of justice and redemption.
Paper long abstract:
The paper analyses the role of community video and visual anthropology methods within a landscape of high levels of violent crime partially addressed through ritualised practices of indigenous law. The highland region of Quiché, Guatemala, has endured a conflictive history of structural, military, criminal, political and racialized violence. There have been very few state mechanisms to tackle this situation, perpetuating high levels of impunity. Since the end of the civil war in 1996, however, community led initiatives have deployed what is called “Mayan law” to tackle violence and crime through local understandings of social healing. These include elaborate public performances which involve ritualised violence intended to change deviants’ behaviour as a pre-condition for reintegrating them in a “more human” fashion to community life. Within a highly conflictive, contested and fragmented social environment, local leaders have used different initiatives, including participatory/collaborative video-making, to educate their constituency about the need to collectively address daily life transgressions and reconstruct a sense of social consensus. I explore how practices to redress social transgressions combine new technological resources as support aid for social healing. Additionally, I theorise the ways my own collaborative project of visual anthropology has engaged situations of conflict and human suffering, by helping to articulate audio-visual narratives of crisis, justice and redemption for both community and academic consumption.
Giovanna Miralles Terán de Wilkin (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Paper short abstract:
The strategies used by Maya women social organisations in times of crisis, permit the emergence of methodologies for collaborative documentary production. The development of these methods, enriched by Maya cultural perspectives, creates an ethnographic proximity in a collective, polyphonic style.
Paper long abstract:
Ethnographic researchers faced the challenge of a new way of conducting studies in the very real obligation to work at distance. Different platforms of communication could be a palliative, still these methods need to be implemented rigorously in a creative way. This paper will explore methods of producing a collaborative documentary with Maya women social organisations.
The leading roles of Maya women in social organisations during and after the Guatemalan civil war (1960-1997) was not fortuitous, many were the only survivors of massacres. These organisations have evolved in different ways, Maya K'iche' sociologist Gladys Tzul Tzul, explained how communal survival strategies in times of war had been successfully used for the Covid-19 pandemic. To gain a fuller understanding of Maya women, we need to look beyond economic discrimination in relation to their knowledge, world-views and philosophies. These will unable us to learn from these organisational and communication strategies, which differ from Western individualism.
With this in mind, for research to be truly collaborative, participatory and ethical, it needs to recognise the agency of the participants. Yet this cannot be exempt of conflict, as the decolonisation theorist Rivera Cusicanqui, concludes: 'Every difference reproduces itself from the depths of the past and relates with the others in a contentious way.' The introduction of a strong network of collaborators in the field: leaders of organisations, local specialists and individuals, will enable the emergence of new methodology using Maya strategies to communicate at a distance in a collective and polyphonic documentary.
Pablo MZ (Universidad Iberoamericana)
Paper short abstract:
This paper shares questions behind the production of films and transmedia projects created in the last decade by the author. They invite us to understand critical and experimental practice as intervention and reimagination of social crises and the horizons of possibility.
Paper long abstract:
During the last decade, I have dedicated my creative practice to expand the horizons of representation and intervention of reality through what can be labeled as experimental documentary art. These works include films, video and interactive installations, web documentaries and transmedia projects, as well as publication and pedagogical experiences. My approach is defined by a critical stance which I understand as inexorably linked to a determined critical scenario (any given social crisis) that the artist-researcher needs to intervene. This critical intervention is a form of resistance that defies the fractured state of affairs and proposes strategies to reimagine the horizons of representation and possibility.
Throughout the exploration of image and sound as vehicles for submerging in the fugitive realities that surround our shared experience, I propose an understanding of artistic practice both as a way of producing alternative knowledge about reality and a way of nurturing and intervening social memory. This conception of documentary practice builds on three main levels of incidence that this paper pretends to summarize: poetics of information, the archive as a critical event, and an eccentric pedagogy. Through these layers, the artist-researcher is capable of tracing maps of subversion of the current order of affairs, depositing in artistic creation the power of altering the architectures of meaning.
Valentina Sarmiento Cruz
Paper short abstract:
This paper suggests repurposing Google Maps’ data, produced and systematized with a goal distinct from the researcher’s, as an archive. My piece, La eterna primavera, takes the amassed Street View imagery as space and time trackers––a useful template to mitigate in situ-research limitations.
Paper long abstract:
La eterna primavera (2019) is a short transmedia piece that focuses on three monuments to help surface the undeclared disputes over collective memory and the recent history of the city of Cuernavaca, Mexico. The project’s research and creative processes are deeply founded in a digital exploration of the data on Google Maps. More specifically, the images found through Google’s Street View (2007) and time machine (2014) features served as the primary source for locating infrastructural changes to the monuments and in their surroundings, both spatially and temporally. Thus, this paper suggests that Google Maps’ multiple representations, including those contributed by the users, offer an archive that is at once available for geographic, temporal, visual, and social analysis.
Although Cuernavaca has been listed among the most dangerous cities in the world in the past couple of decades, its violence was not, in this specific case, the main reason why the author turned to Google Maps’ data as opposed to conducting fieldwork. The project’s content wasn’t a cause for concern either, as it didn’t impair the safety of the people appearing in the piece or my own. Lastly, the piece was published in November of 2019, thus eluding the pandemic and the obstacles we now face when developing research projects. Instead, the “extraordinary setting” in which the project was developed was that of distance between the writer and the site, a condition that we may continue to face. Therefore, repurposing Google Maps’ data can prove a helpful template.