- Convenors:
-
Alastair Lomas
(University of Manchester)
Charlotte Hoskins (University of Oxford)
Andrea Bordoli (University of Bern)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel Discussion
- Start time:
- 19 March, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Do crises disrupt normative notions of the 'chronotope' - the spatio-temporal coordinates in a given narrative? To explore how current global phenomena are reconfiguring relations to time and space, we invite contributions of sound-image-letters as a form of experimental correspondence.
Long Abstract:
Do crises disrupt the habitual rhythms that regulate people's lives, altering normative spatio-temporal configurations? This panel, departing from Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope (the coordinates of time and space within a given narrative) is an invitation to explore 'chronotopes during crisis.' In particular, we wish to draw together different perspectives via an exchange of short sound-image-letters that experiment with the mode of correspondence as a tool for creatively reconfiguring time and space. Understanding that the properties inherent in sound and image make them exemplary modes through which to critically engage chronotopes, we encourage contributors to address alternative pasts, different presents and desired futures. How does making and thinking in sound and image, its editing processes, and the letter as a narrative form further illuminate, disrupt or otherwise reconfigure chronotopes? How might these methods allow us to speculate other possibilities? How do the intimate spatio-temporal narratives embedded within letters stretch across the potential asynchronies of crisis?
The panel conveners shared an initial sound-image-letters as part of the open call, asking practitioners of anthropology, of the audiovisual arts, or of those involved in fertile collaborations between the two, to respond in the form of their own sound-image-letters. These take the form of videos, less than five minutes in duration. During the live panel we aim to open a space for community dialogue built on and around these themes.
Please find the convenors' sound-image-letter here: https://vimeo.com/451913782
Accepted papers:
Session 1Max Bloching (Goldsmiths)
Paper short abstract:
This sound-image-letter is a scene from the collaborative documentary Unwritten Letters. Abd, a young Syrian filmmaker who recently arrived to Italy, turns here to a friend who had passed away on their journey. In this letter, Abd travels into the future and remembers their shared past in Syria.
Paper long abstract:
Unwritten Letters is a collaborative documentary, co-directed by Max Bloching and the protagonist of the film, the young Syrian Abd Alrahman Dukmak. Unwritten Letters explores Abd's experience of moving to Italy through the collaborative process of filming, editing and letter writing. In several letters, Abd reaches out to a Syrian friend who had passed away on his way to Italy. Trying to find peace with his present, Abd turns to his friend to revisit their shared past in Syria and to imagine possible futures.
Letter sequence for RAI Panel
https://vimeo.com/479926297/7dd4a4235e
Project website:
https://maxbloching.com/Unwritten-Letters
Charlotte Hoskins (University of Oxford)
Paper long abstract:
This 'letter' takes its form from the sounds of two Christian hymns that are sung with tender frequency by an Anglican parish from a Makushi village in the Upper Takutu - Upper Essequibo region of Guyana. These voices, render the hymnal texts 'I shall not be moved' and 'Jesus loves me this I know' to be audible in particular ways. An attempt to further dislocate the potential fixed meaning of these hymns, is suggested by the images they are paired with here. Working in the material of sound, text, and image I consider carefully the relationship between sound as it is heard, its lettered form as text, and the work of the image.
Jeferson Scabio (Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Paper short abstract:
My letter explores embodied words of pain and anger with an audio recording from a demonstration in Alemão, a favela of Rio de Janeiro.
Paper long abstract:
My letter explores embodied words of pain and anger with an audio recording from a demonstration in Alemão, a favela of Rio de Janeiro where bodies, banners, motorcycles and a carro de som — a car carrying an amplifier — gather and walk together, making noise and raising their voices for Ágatha, an eight year old girl who was shot by a policeman on her way back home.
María Casas
Paper short abstract:
Somewhere in Mexico, a girl goes missing, and a city boils in anger. As this happens, I watch my carnivorous plant catch a fly. From several windows, we all wait for time to settle down and do its justice.
Paper long abstract:
https://vimeo.com/473539256
Password: MOSCAS
Somewhere in Mexico, a girl goes missing, and a city boils in anger. As this happens, I watch my carnivorous plant catch a fly. From several windows, we all wait for time to settle down and do its justice.
Anna Joos
Paper short abstract:
How does a state of crisis render visible that of the work of the anthropologist's gaze, so accustomed to being directed towards far away places, when she cannot leave her home, and not least, when she has to give up attempts to 'leave her own body'?
Paper long abstract:
https://vimeo.com/467768185
'Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a wild longing that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret.'
- Oscar Wilde
Panos Achniotis (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
During lockdown, I created this short drama using extracts from voice messages on my Whatsapp and footage that I accumulated on my phone's camera memory. The aim was to create a narrative that touches upon the themes of nostalgia and future possibilities during times which are certainly uncertain.
Paper long abstract:
https://vimeo.com/399649534
(password: voice2020)
During lockdown I was inspired to use random footage which I have accumulated on my phone's memory alongside bits and pieces of many people's words extracted from voice messages they've shared with me, to create a short drama which touches upon the themes of everyday nostalgia, of desire to travel and to meet as well as to explore possible futures within diverse geographies.
Eza Doortmont
Paper short abstract:
Working with the idea of any crisis having a begin, middle and an end. Although most crisises are looked at afterwards, not evaluated during the crisis itself. This fact changes the perception and the effect of the perception of the time and space within the crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Working with the idea of any crisis having a begin, middle and an end. Although most crisises are looked at afterwards, not evaluated during the crisis itself. This fact changes the perception and the effect of the perception of the time and space within the crisis.
Link to production - https://vimeo.com/479359463
Gerrit Stollbrock Trujillo (Universidad Externado and Los Andes (Bogota, Colombia))
Paper short abstract:
Four letters to my deceased grandfather reflecting on edges, boundaries, interstices, in this moment of intensified differentiations and global suspense, based on a photographic diary I started making while daily watching the sunset at my window.
Paper long abstract:
The 5th of April I started a daily "ritual": in a kind of meditation, for four months until quarantine in Bogotá (Colombia) was suspended, I would follow the sunset out of my flats’ window, right before the city light in front of me began to glue. I would do a photographic and audiovisual register. Some days I would write some notes in a diary, my grandfather, a chemist and mystic, being a main character of my reflections on this suspended times.
Some days later I would realize that those two words, which had been impregnating my mind while witnessing twilight, “ocaso”, sunset in Spanish, and “ocasión”, “occasion”, not only held my moods ambiguities, but had also a common etymological root. My reflections would then further focus on my daily experiences with borders and differentiations, so exacerbated during this pandemic, and its disruptions trough notions as “interstice”, “edge”.
For this audiovisual “chronotope” I built a collage of some of these photographs, together with a soundscape recorded in those same twilight hours, chose four days of my diary, and turned them into an audiovisual letter to my grandfather.
It’s a work in progress I will further develop in the following months.
Saada Elabed (ISEK (university of Zurich))
Paper short abstract:
The birth of a child brings abrupt changes and different form of crises with it. This audio visual project explores how the process of becoming a parent impacts the way time and space are perceived.
Paper long abstract:
Often, we connotate something rather negative to the concept of crisis. Instead of looking at crisis as something tragic, we like to connotate it to a positive event: the birth of our child. An arrival which disrupted our lives on many different levels, an event which putted us in different crises even before taking place.
In this cooperative audio visual project we explore how the arrival of a child can impact the life of a parent, in other words: how becoming a parent changes the perception of time and space. What dimension does the space acquire? How is the time perceived? This project aims to explore these two dimensions from the parent's perspective.
Through the editing process, that is through the assemblage of images, sound and music (recorded and produced during the pregnancy period and after our child's birth), we attempt to reconstruct a specific narrative. We recognize the importance of an open approach to give space to memories and connected sensations and feelings, as we believe that the process of becoming parents is rather an embodied experience than a mere observation. We also do not follow a specific chronology but rather like to build it around the narrative as it manifests itself through the editing process.
About the authors:
Gregor Frei is a musician and composer and Saada Elabed a visual anthropologist. Together they are parents to one child since little more than one year.
José Sherwood Gonzalez (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Paper short abstract:
‘(Per)sonified Letters’ experiments with image-text and sound-image by taking interview recordings about a handwritten letter from my Mexican great-grandmother to my great-grandfather in Detroit, Michigan in 1944 in order to render audible the sense of uncertainty embedded within.
Paper long abstract:
Here is the video link to my submission - '(Per)sonified Letters: Mi Chatito Mocoso': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY47qw8mZVA
Juan Castrillón (University of Pennsylvania)
Paper short abstract:
This work envisions an audiovisual correspondence between Fukuda and Juan Castrillón's experiences in the Northwestern Amazon and Rwanda, in which they explore different notions of crisis and temporalities on a shared-perspective chronotope.
Paper long abstract:
After forty years, the Cubeo Emi-Hehenewa people (an indigenous community living at the Northwest Amazon, southern Colombia) decided to build a new ceremonial long house, merging a recent past in which they were deprived of their own ceremonial life due to Christian missionization and a present embedded in ancestral Cubeo spaces and temporalities. This sound-image-letter presents my interest on the essay film, understood as a thinking-through-gaps artifact (Rascaroli 2017), to explore an audiovisual rendition of the spatio-temporal narratives of my fieldwork among the Cubeo featuring this building process. This rendition is not a proper translation of the Cubeo. Rather, it holds filmmaking on the notion of equivocality -- "to situate oneself in the space of the equivocation and to dwell there" (Viveiros de Castro 2004) -- to see how the meaning of the ceremonial long house appears mistranslated, misspelled, or perhaps transfigured, as new situations surround the construction of these ceremonial site. By exploring this notion of equivocality, I suggest that the encounter between audiovisualities happens asynchronously, opening gaps for new and varied evaluations to emerge; in which heard voices, fluid pronouns, and blurred and moved images interact. This exploration sets the correspondence with Fukuda's works, proposing a chronotope that diffracts and situates different perspectives.
Pero Fukuda (Ritsumeikan Univeristy)
Paper short abstract:
This work experiments to question and multiply the notion of crisis and construct a polyphonic transcontinental audio-visual chronotope by letting Fukuda and Juan Castrillón's fieldwork footages=experiences correspond, mirror, follow, askew and shadow each other.
Paper long abstract:
The formal structure is as follows. Fukuda sends a minute or less clip to Castrillón and Castrillón will send back a clip which communicates with Fukuda's and Fukuda will send another in response and then Castrillón...... taking turns. Hence this is literally a correspondence spoken not in words but with audio and/ or visual media. In Fukuda's case, most of the material comes from rural Rwanda where he conducts fieldwork where there is no Covid-19, new normal nor internet, being it a reminder of marginalisation in the global crisis. The already polyphony of audio-visual chronotope emerging from the strong presence of time C and E-series (Nomura, 2010) in Fukuda's fieldwork experience will be amplified by Castrillón's footages=experiences in the Columbian Amazonia attesting to the plurality of global crisis.