Contribution short abstract:

Of Flesh and Concrete is an experimental visual ethnography of somatic culture in a Colombian city, with a focus on "fitness practices". The film seeks to represent and reckon embodied, affective experience in novel ways.

Contribution long abstract:

I’m currently doing fieldwork in Medellin, Colombia, exploring “fitness” cultures and practices, asking how these relate to shifting socioeconomic, architectural, and gender logics. In addition to working towards a written PhD thesis, I am making a film. I’m taking a truly experimental approach, in the sense that I’m playing with forms and methods in the field to discover novel means to represent and reckon affective experiences and somatic cultures. To quote Loic Wacquant, can we better evoke and understand the "taste and the ache of the action" with film?

In line with the spirit of experimentation, I genuinely can’t envision what I’m working towards (or, rather, I resist envisioning it!). By March 2023 I will be halfway through my year of fieldwork, and would like to share some representative examples of my experiments. I would really apprecaite some thoughts on these experiments, to help refine and define my concept. That is tos ay, the conversation will help shape the approach I’ll take in the second half of my fieldwork.