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.