- Convenors:
-
Lee Douglas
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Ricardo Leizaola (Goldsmiths)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Partner Event
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 7 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Responding to calls for imagining an anthropology of the otherwise, participants will discuss how experimentation in anthropology and documentary provide a critical lens for understanding where this discipline has gone and where it is going.
Long Abstract:
The MA in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths offers a unique combination of anthropological theory and visual practice that equips students to both make and analyse visual artefacts. In this roundtable, alumni from the program share approaches to anthropology and filmmaking by reflecting on how their visual practice responds to contemporary debates and technological shifts. Responding to calls for imagining an anthropology of the otherwise, participants will discuss how experimentation in anthropology and documentary provide a critical lens for understanding where this discipline has gone and where it is going.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 7 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Sophie Howie Exit Stage Right My research has focused on the home as a site to understand sensory memory and personhood. Presence/absence is seen in alternate ways when we recognise the social lives of objects. I work for a London-based arts charity and make films for passion and freelance work.
Paper long abstract:
My work is on the home as a site for understanding sensory memory and personhood. Presence/absence is understood in alternate ways when we look at objects as social beings. Exit Stage Right explores the intersections of personhood, grief and the home in an intimate look at the filmmakers experiences of her Father's home in the days after his untimely death. The home becomes alive even in the physical absence of its primary owner, maintaining remnants of his presence beyond death.
Paper short abstract:
Independent filmmaker, recently graduated with an MA in Visual Anthropology, works include 'A Murmuration over Minsmere' and 'The Skin of the Earth.
Paper long abstract:
Independent filmmaker, recently graduated with an MA in Visual Anthropology, works include 'A Murmuration over Minsmere' and 'The Skin of the Earth.
Paper short abstract:
As Aye, (film project) - a fragment of correspondence with author and storyteller, Jess Smith, and with the 'absent presence' of Scottish Travellers in the archive and the landscape.
Paper long abstract:
As Aye, is a fragment of correspondence with author and storyteller, Jess Smith, and with the 'absent presence' of Scottish Travellers in the archive and the landscape.
Drawing on the memory and legacy of The Tinkers Heart, an ancient memorial and stopping place in Argyll and Bute, the film traces elliptical tellings of history carried on the tongue, in the body, through the lens and on the land. At the confluence of three old roads that run parallel to the new, the Heart gathers together a contested terrain of remembrance, love, loss and reparation.
Paper short abstract:
Tom Skinner is a photographer, filmmaker and educator. His film 'He Lived for Steam' (2022) was produced for the MA Visual Anthropology programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Paper long abstract:
Tom Skinner is a photographer, filmmaker and educator. His film 'He Lived for Steam' (2022) was produced for the MA Visual Anthropology programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
The film follows the life of a scrapped steam locomotive as it is restored to working order in the Forest of Dean. Within this narrative themes of family history, community, the archive and memory are explored.
Paper short abstract:
capital-led ecologies have brought to hyper-exploitation of human and other-than-human labor. This world doesn't belong to human political languages that create borders. How can we imagine new architectures if our language cages and imprisons? no need of creating connections but undo separations.
Paper long abstract:
Film can help us living sensory aspects of the world and so making us feel connected to landscapes without the unnecessary use of language. The sensorial and the poetic can help us reach a status of inter dimensional understanding.
Human extinction has become the inevitable expected result of neoliberalism and this acknowledgement is accelerating processes of accumulation to their limits. Can we frame this feeling of extinction?
Throughout the exploration of interspecies relations in nature-based ecologies we can frame power dynamics between human and other-than-humans as well as vertical dynamics happening between bordered human worlds. At the actual state of things "a redistribution of wealth is the only way to avoid a planetary holocaust" says Franco "Bifo" Berardi. Horizontality and happiness can exist for everyone, but the only way to achieve them is by redistributing wealth. Thought redistribution is only possible throughout re-thinking cosmologies and narratives that design orders and borders. The poetic and the sensorial embrace the possibility of bypassing modern and scientific structures of language to open channels towards new imaginaries.