- Convenors:
-
Lucietta Williams
(University of the West of England)
Cathy Greenhalgh (Independent)
Susan Falls (Savannah College of Art and Design)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on anthropologist / artists using collage as speculative future imaginary. Collage is a ubiquitous technique using appropriated, cut-up, juxtaposed elements in re-constructed individual and collaborative expression. It is a medium currently under-theorised, despite its ubiquity.
Long Abstract:
This panel focuses on anthropologist / artists using the collage medium as speculative future imaginary through discovering and creating collage worlds. Artists since the early twentieth century have produced for example, mixed-media collages, sculptural forms and installations so anthropologists have also worked with word/image compositions and exhibition formats (Clifford, 1988; Sansi ,2015; Schneider & Wright, 2015). Collage as a medium and technique is currently developing in a variety of contexts and the panel offers an examination of how anthropologists can further use collage to expand their ways of working.
We suggest collage (including animation, assemblage, montage and photo-montage) has specific properties and operations. It can be digital or analogue, but generally implies found sources, cut-up, juxtaposed and layered, using appropriation, absurdity and dis-junction to challenge meaning and indicate new possibilities. Collage recycles waste components, is cheap to make and requires minimal tools and artistic expertise to be realised individually or collaboratively. It seems to have arisen at times of war and pandemic as an especially pertinent means to express and cope with the nature of collapse and trauma. It is cited as having creative therapeutic possibility and empowering under-represented communities and collaborative identity (Farebrother, 2009; Kanyer, 2021; Henderson, 2021), where the ‘undercommons’ is the necessary means of transmission (Stefano and Moten, 2013). We combine theory from art, film and literature: Baldacci et al (2018), Banash (2013), Brockelman (2001), Drag (2020), Etgar (2017), Flood et al (2009), Hoffman (1989), McLeod et al (2011).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Historiography and speculative futures collide in my Covid Collage Chronicles series, an “ars-combinatoria” chronicle and diary of the Covid 19 pandemic. Dissemination led to a “patchwork” through learning appropriation, disjunction and juxtaposition as resistance tactics for therapy and repair.
Paper long abstract:
Historiography and speculative futures collide in my Covid Collage Chronicles series , a visual anthropology “ars-combinatoria” chronicle and diary of the Covid 19 pandemic consisting of four hundred collages made between May 2020 and August 2022. Collage is a way of entering, messing around with and thinking through absurdity, when we need recovery in a “time with no answers”. Michael Taussig shares experiments with collectives coping with the ‘age of meltdown’ and ‘dark surrealism’, by relaying Indigenous myth as metaphor: ‘Don’t think of this as “over there” and “back then”, as something exotically primitive. Instead stitch it into your current views and make a collage and see how you feel about your “normal” (Taussig, 2019, my italics). Justin Smith seeks authentic narrative: ‘Blackness aesthetically exists in a collaged state....Collage is a form of time-keeping, time-coding, time-capsuling our creative lineages along an amplified spectrum’ (in Henderson, 2021). Because the collagist appropriates from available material culture, they can enhance hidden aspects, undercut dominant portrayals, point to untruths and assumptions and create imaginary lore. I point to use of appropriation, disjunction and juxtaposition as resistance tactics and the work of solidarity, building community and repairing relationships. Robert O’Meally’s notion that ‘Selves and communities are collages and this improvisation is collaborative as quilters using cloth patches’ is inspired by Michel de Montaigne’s notion that ‘we are all patchwork....All cut from a single piece of cloth’ (2002). My background involves cloth and for this paper I concentrate on those collages using patchwork-like technique.
Paper short abstract:
The wrack floating at the edges of the tides both powers and indexes the consumerism of the postmodern political economy; taking the wrack as collage, writ both small and large, we present a live narration of cut and pasted moving AV media.
Paper long abstract:
We view the impending anthropogenic catastrophe from a front row seat here in Savannah, Georgia. The ocean, the Savannah River, and the intracoastal waterways border and wend throughout the city; not a day goes by that we do not see the tidal waters rise and retreat, bringing with them messages in the form of animals, algaes, microplastics, and chemical traces from afar. Over the last few years, we have experienced mandatory evacuations, fleeing from hurricane force winds and rising waves. The Savannah River, meanwhile, has been dredged and deepened to connect one of the largest ports in the United States with other international seaposts; cargo ships floating the river dwarf every building; their monstrous scale and digital horns driven by a national infrastructure focused on commodity consumerism. The wrack floating at the edges of the tides both brings and indexes the consumerism that a postmodern political economy requires; taking the wrack as collage writ both small and large, we present a live narration of cut and pasted moving AV media.
Paper short abstract:
I will consider a variety of collage practices as alchemical transformation pertaining to women and children; I’m especially interested in exploring issues of irruption and interruption.
Paper long abstract:
My paper takes its inspiration from a phrase attributed to a magical alchemist who likened the work of alchemy to “women’s work and children’s games.” Key to his notion of alchemy is the handling of materials—cutting and pasting, assembling ingredients together in a recipe, or mixing chemicals to create gold.
I will consider a variety of collage practices as alchemical transformation, focusing particularly on the strategy of interruption. Collage practices often share an impulse to interrupt the flow of dominant discourse and imagine new configurations of meaning. This strategy is especially apparent in the practice of “culture jamming” that has been an important practice informing a great deal of current work that bridges the art and scholarly divide.
Paper short abstract:
DUST & METAL (CÁT BỤI & KIM LOẠI) brings together for the first time, a poetic collage film using little seen archive from Hanoi-based Vietnam Film Institute. Artist Filmmaker Esther Johnson will share extracts from her film and discuss the approach to selecting archive material for the work.
Paper long abstract:
DUST & METAL (CÁT BỤI & KIM LOẠI) brings together for the first time, a poetic collage feature film using little seen archive film from Hanoi-based Vietnam Film Institute (VFI). Directed by Esther Johnson, the project has resulted in a unique partnership with VFI, and TPD: The Centre for Assistance and Development of Movie Talents, for digitising rare and difficult to access archive film. With a score composed by San Francisco-based electronic artist Xo Xinh, and sound design by Hanoi-based artist Nhung Nguyễn, the global pandemic led to creative collaborative co-production methods for the production between the UK, Vietnam and US.
Funded by the British Council, DUST & METAL steps away from Hollywood’s portrayals of the American/Vietnam War, to instead offer an unorthodox perspective of Vietnam past and present. Alternative perspectives of Vietnamese cultural heritage are told through the synergy of difficult to access archive film, crowd-sourced material, newly shot footage, and oral histories. At the heart of the research are unfamiliar histories of Vietnam that connect with the country’s ubiquitous mode of transport: the MOTORBIKE. With a population of 97 million, and 45 million registered motorbikes (the highest in SE Asia) that’s almost one bike for every two people.
This presentation will comprise film extracts, discuss archive film selection, the digitisation of and integration of archive within a new work, in addition to learnings from the first ever partnership the Vietnam Film Institute has undertaken with an artist filmmaker.
www.dustandmetal.com
https://linktr.ee/dustandmetal