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Paper short abstract:

Building on two collaborative fiction-making experiences I had in Granada with musicians and with activists of a social movement, in this paper I reflect on how creative multimodal methods can help in co-creating shared ethnographic knowledges through a speculative approach to ‘reality’.

Paper long abstract:

The relations between anthropology and fiction have always been uneasy. A ‘fiction’ is something moulded, dependent of the creative action of the subject—quite the opposite with respect to the principle of observation-description-analysis that structured the epistemological boundaries of the discipline for more than a century. Building on two collaborative experiences of ethnographic fiction-making I had in the past three years, in this paper I will reflect on how creative multimodal methods can help in co-creating shared ethnographic knowledges through a speculative approach to ‘reality’.

The first experience concerns the production of ‘ethnographically grounded music videos’—a sort of musical ethnofictions in which musicians who are based in Granada deal with the influences that the Muslim past has on their ‘orientalist’ imaginary. The second experience is about the production of the 1st season of a radio-drama written, produced and performed by a group of activists of Stop Evictions Granada 15M—an assembly-based social movement that fights for decent housing rights.

In both cases, the creation of audiovisual or radiophonic fictional narratives constituted speculative occasions for (re)imagining together the past, the present and the future of very ‘real’ and often problematic situations.