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Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to question the possibilities of drawing as a non-retrospective ethnographic method bridging the gap between observation and description. How can “thinking (and seeing) through drawing” enable this connection?

Paper long abstract:

Describing human life and behaviours is an intense and sensorial project, and in doing so, art and anthropology are not so distant. In the English language, to draw has many meanings, including to attract, move, pull in, and extract, all of them implying a movement towards or in the subject. A fusion or intertwining that is transformative. The drawing process is a mimetic process: when one draws, becomes what one draws.

“What the eye sees is but the result of the (model’s) inner impulse, and to understand one must use something more than the eye. It is necessary to participate in what the model is doing, to identify yourself with it.” (Nicolaides, 1941: 24)

This is Kimon Nicolaïdes, a Greek-American art teacher who theorized about gesture drawing in the first half of the 1900s. In this technique, which involves drawing the model without interruption, without ever lifting the pencil from the paper, speed is the essence (maximum one minute per pose). Hence, thought is minimalized, and the hand takes over. Actually, the whole body, still, but in tension, imagines itself trying to imitate the pose assumed by the model. In these rough lines, movement, observation, and description find a connection, merging with each other.

This paper starts from the drawing perspectival point to visualize and capture movement through the gesture technique and moves to the anthropological perspective to explore its possible applications, challenging the opposition between visual anthropology and written ethnography.