Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how a performance-based, multimodal approach to ethnographic process and representation can mobilize alternative ways of engaging with memory and absence. These ways of imagining can, in turn, problematize our existing approaches to studying absence as worldmaking praxis.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we explore what we call “ethnobricolage” – a performance-based, multimodal approach to ethnographic process and representation—by analyzing the project the morning I died I flew over the tobacco fields. Developed in collaboration with a Toronto-based Romanichal multimedia artist, the project combined physical theatre performance, audiovisual ethnography, and written and oral storytelling to reflect on family, memory, and absence. Ethnobricolage can, we argue, constitute a novel technique of ethnographic worldmaking that blurs the lines between the senses, between fiction and reality, and between memory and confabulation. Constructing ethnographic knowledge in this twilight zone that lies somewhere between the existing and the emergent allows us to let go of our notions of temporality and mobilize alternative worldmaking practices. In our research, audiovisual ethnography allowed us to tap into these sensory spaces of absence, uncertainty and emergence, and imagine alternative worlds and possibilities. In particular, we explore how employing physical theatre, ethnographic film methods, video screenings and facilitated audience discussions might offer novel modes of sensory and reflexive engagement. By showing film clips from our storytelling sessions, theatre rehearsals, and public screenings, we hope to open a conversation on how ethnobricolage might problematize our ethnographic study of memory, absence and worldmaking.