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Paper short abstract

The Enactive Gaze, is a short film produced for the HANDMADE project. It explores the multimodality of seeing and skilled vision in pottery making. I discuss the methodological and theoretical challenges of film making as performance and mode of visual representation in the anthropology of craft.

Paper long abstract

To actively observe through the lenses of a camera, means to go beyond recording and documenting, allowing the camera to ‘capture’ events in a dynamic interaction and constant negotiation with its environment (potters, clay, camera operator, research members, other media etc.). Following the methodology of Perspectival Kinaesthetic Imaging, ethnographic film aims to present a visual exegesis of events, participating actively in the search for knowledge. In this way, filming is not about the process of clay-making but part of it. As such, the film acquires some qualities of the process: it becomes open-ended and transformative, communicating sensations beyond seeing, ‘closing up’ on the kinaesthetic experience of the creative gesture.