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Paper short abstract

Avonmouth: An interactive conversation is a three-dimensional sensory documentary that brings people and place into dialogue. We explore its relationship to collage and how the collaborative methodology, creative design and multi-modal exhibition work together to catalyse further dialogue and action

Paper long abstract

Avonmouth is a place in transition lying at the mouth of the river Avon, and sea connection with the rest of the world. Here wind farms, nuclear power stations, recycling centres and carbon capture facilities dominate the landscape, all part of the city of Bristol’s efforts to reach net zero by 2050 and to create “a fair, healthy and sustainable city where everyone can share in its success”. The documentary is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and was co-created with members of the community in partnership with the Avonmouth Community Centre. The objective: to find a creative and collaborative way for local residents to share their stories, experiences and concerns and bring them into dialogue, revealing some of the complex entanglements between people and place.

The piece uses single shots, layering and juxtaposition in a spatial configuration, opening up a space to engage with the relationship between montage and collage. Looped landscapes, short unedited testimonies and stories are presented in an embedded, sensory, affective three-dimensional form. There are three levels of engagement, the first, where the viewer is introduced to the reality of the residents. The second explores solutions being found by the residents who are taking action in response to these realities. The third introduces a range of visions for Avonmouth's future. The routes through these levels is guided wherever possible through image and sound, not text. Through encountering their own juxtapositions the viewer is able to make meaning from the piece.

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Experimenting with collage and animation in Anthropology and Black Studies, and attending to practices of mourning and remembrance in New Orleans, the paper explores what remains in the aftermath of loss, accounting for and anticipating new permutations of identity, culture, and form.

Paper long abstract

This paper showcases artistic and intellectual experiments with collage and animation at the intersection of Anthropology and Black Studies. Inspired by the beauty and utility of collage within the Black experience, the paper represents a theoretical and methodological shift, beyond the persistence of anti-Black violence and death and towards an orientation of black aliveness (Quashie 2021). Sorting through the remnants of fieldwork in post-Katrina New Orleans (including interview excerpts, photographs, and archival images), the paper attends to local practices of mourning and remembrance to illustrate Black ways of transformative enduring in these times. It explores collage as an essential tool for sorting through what remains in the complex aftermath of loss, accounting for and anticipating new permutations of identity, culture, and form through processes such as cutting, rearranging, and adhering (Delmez 2023). The multiplicity and impact of this work, a visual form of Black story (re)telling, is enhanced in the digital realm where compositing programs set things in motion at various speeds and scales. The paper discusses the ability of an animated collage to exist in a state of suspension between representation and simulation, making it difficult to anchor what one observes or experiences as knowable and thus possible to push past conventional frames into new territory (Cholodenko 1991). After presenting clips of work in progress, the paper concludes by theorizing scraps as bits as bytes, considering collages as data hubs and their circulation as a form of Black coding (Johnson and Neal 2017) in an age of (mis/dis)information.

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My documentary animation film Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist, Writer, Fighter, is underpinned by ethnographic and archival research and uses both analogue and digital collage techniques.

Paper long abstract

My documentary animation film Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist, Writer, Fighter, is underpinned by ethnographic and archival research and uses both analogue and digital collage techniques.

My film Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist, Writer, Fighter, was conceived whilst working as Head of Animation at the Royal College of Art. I discovered Sylvia had been a student there. I undertook ethnographic and archival research and interviewed her son Richard who allowed me access to her paintings of working women. The surviving Pankhurst papers provided inspiration by the material qualities of notebooks, typescripts and drawings.

Different forms of animation, collage and cut-out techniques allowed documentary representation of Pankhurst’s long life and work as both an artist and campaigner. I will show film vignettes and explain the influence of Andrea Artz’s 3d method of folding photos, so that Sylvia could be fused with her own writing and into maps. This engendered a sense of her travels in the North of England, America and Ethiopia, the progress of suffrage and juxtapose Edwardian dress and Silvia’s modernist tendencies.

There is an absence of footage of Sylvia and she arises here as a restless figure seen through her paper trail. I used traditional stop-frame light and shadow and digital scaling and placing. This is ‘trimensional collage’ and ‘creasing the archive’, a way of animating historical time, memory and one individual through her own evidence.

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"Auto-ethnographic co-creative collage" is introduced to research, analyse and represent people's interepretative framework on their experience of personal, moral and social disruption, in the context of Traumatic Brain Injury, in Rome.

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on research conducted in Rome on the lived experience of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), a non-degenerative injury to the brain caused by an external force. The research is grounded on my experience of TBI, caused by a road accident, in 2005, in Rome. Yet, in the Italian capital city, I worked with twelve people who had experienced a TBI, and who were willing to embark in a collaborative journey of self-discovery on their life-changing experience. To explore how people negotiate their corporeality, socio-moral relationships, sense of self and identity, and imagination, following disruption, research interlocutors and I developed a set of innovative auto-ethnographic co-creative methods, “Auto-ethnographic Dialogue”.

This paper focuses on one such method, “Auto-ethnographic Co-creative Collage”. Through a detailed analysis of the process and resulting artistic outputs, the paper argues that this method created an intersubjective ethnographic field for the emergence of the interlocutors' ways of making sense of their experiences of disruption. Intersubjective, here, refers to interactions between people (including modalities of the self), places and objects. The seemingly serendipitous selection and juxtaposition of images and entanglement of agency fostered the development of novel understandings, perceptions, and interpretive frameworks, challenging existing biomedical models of TBI.

Yet collage poses the problem of how to work with images in Anthropology . Experimenting with this technique directly I propose its use as a form of analysis, interpretation, representation...

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This paper stages a discussion around my film Notes: Remembered and Found (2024) and introduces it through a key scene where a hand holds a photographic negative above a lightbox, preparing it for printing in a darkroom. The scene epitomises the film's engagement with analogue photography and cinema

Paper long abstract

The concept of the "poor image," coined by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl, underscores the transformation of images into reflections of their own existence, shaped by appropriation and exploitation. Influenced by Peter Loizos’ theory of the types of time in Cyprus, the film kaleidoscopically collages familial archival material: cassette tapes, notebooks, diaries and family photographs, handled and negotiated by four generations of women.

The film grapples with questions of cultural memory, identity, and the role of photography in post-conflict societies. In conclusion the paper critically examines the notion of ethnographic imagery and war photography in particular, and reflecting on the manipulation of images for nationalist propaganda, challenges audiences to reconsider how images can be reimagined to foster post-nationalist understandings of Cypriot history.

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This talk reflects on the artistic research project "Geography of Ghosts", which used digital LiDAR scanning and social science methods to explore spatial dimensions of refugee health. It involved intensive collaging of re-enacted interviews and self-recorded scans in a real-time game engine.

Paper long abstract

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanning processes (i.e., using laser light to create distance maps between a transmitter and spatial objects) are used for land surveying in geography and for producing precise 3D models of existing buildings in architecture. This talk shares insights from the artistic research project “Geography of Ghosts” (GoG), which created audio-visual collages centered on refugee health. GoG combined empirical findings from ethnographic social science research conducted in Vienna, Austria, with theoretical perspectives on visibility and invisibility, as well as self-recorded LiDAR scans.

We documented large spaces, such as the exterior of an asylum accommodation and the waiting room of a doctor’s office, using a FARO LiDAR scanner. For smaller objects, like medical equipment, and more detailed interior scenes, we employed a photogrammetry application. Utilizing digital compositing techniques drawn from a spatial design approach, we created a cinematic collage that combined re-enacted interview quotes from refugees and healthcare providers with visual representations of the lucid, spectral, and fragmented materiality of these LiDAR scans, all integrated within a real-time game engine.

This talk proposes that combining LiDAR scans with empirical social science research data holds epistemological (what kinds of knowledges can be created?), communicative (how to communicate research insights through LiDAR scans based collages and discuss them with different publics?), and dialogical potential (what possibilities emerge for participatory research?).

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The paper explores a workshop with students at the University of Cagliari, using analogue collage to discuss Sardinian tourism and heritage. It highlights how students' collages reveal tensions between stereotypical/authentic and global/local imaginaries in the perception of the island's heritage.

Paper long abstract

Presenting the outcomes of a workshop conducted with MA students at the University of Cagliari (Sardinia), the paper aims at discussing analogue collage as a teaching and research tool within anthropology of tourism and heritage. The workshop took place in November 2024 and was divided into three main phases: an analytical phase, in which students had to choose and study an essay about heritage and tourism in Sardinia; a creative phase, in which each one produced a collage representing their own interpretation of the Sardinian tourism imaginaries based on the essay, and, lastly, a phase of discussion of their works.

Following Noel Salazar’s conceptualisation (2012), imaginaries work as socially transmitted assemblages, representations, devices of meaning-making and world-shaping, they are often constructed around dichotomies and influence how individuals interpret and shape their experience of otherness, about both places and peoples. While working on a collage, handling a given material guides a reflection able to point out the production of meaning, rather than presenting a given reality. Through the analysis of the collages and narratives produced by students, the paper reflects on how this creative method can be used to highlight the dialectic tensions between stereotypical/authentic, global/local within tourism and heritage imaginaries.

More precisely, the paper will explore the selection and reinterpretation of images and words associated with Sardinian heritage by students, and how the creation of collages encompasses not only individual points of views, but also broader social and cultural dynamics connected to the perception of the island’s heritage.

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Inspired by the tradition of experimental collage artists such as Wangechi Mutu and Seana Gavin, I have undertaken multi-species ethnographic work with a pony, employing a method akin to counter-intuitive texturing—a layering of unexpected materials, perspectives, and methodologies.

Paper long abstract

Inspired by the tradition of experimental collage artists such as Wangechi Mutu and Seana Gavin, I have undertaken multi-species ethnographic work with a pony, employing a method akin to counter-intuitive texturing—a layering of unexpected materials, perspectives, and methodologies. Extending the social sciences to include making with the flora and fauna with whom we coexist, this work explores how non-human entities are not merely passive backdrops to human activity but active co-participants in shaping our shared world. Through somatic collage work that attends to the embodied, temporal, and spatial sensitivities of a single pony, I investigate alternative modes of knowing and being.

This exploration suggests that engaging deeply with the extra-human lifeworlds of animals can broaden our understanding of sociality, affect, and interspecies connection. It demonstrates how such methods may allow us to reconfigure our relationships with the non-human, seeing them not simply as objects of study but as collaborators in generating new insights about survival, coexistence, and creativity.

As Samuel Beckett reminds us: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Of course, like any experimental method, this somatic collage may not meet traditional scholarly expectations. Yet, in its imperfections lies its power: to reveal answers to unasked questions.

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Paper short abstract

Much ethnographic work relies on narrative as ways to represent research. Text and film, are time-bound: unfolding with each sentence, or sequence. This paper uses specific collage examples to explore and discuss how collage challenges regimes of representation to create other spaces of enunciation.

Paper long abstract

Much ethnographic work relies on storytelling and narrative as ways to represent experiences, histories and understandings. In text as well as film, these forms are bound to time, as they unfold with each sentence, or sequence. By contrast, images present other onto-epistemological commitments that are necessarily non-linear. Beyond the surface imagination of collage, the use of juxtaposition and fragmentation as discursive techniques are at once destructive and productive: this is the paradox of collage (and the trickster nature). This paper uses specific collage examples in the data generation, analysis and representation phases of research to explore and discuss how collage not only challenges regimes of representation, but also provides pathways to create work that pierces the constructedness and univocity of traditional narratives. Not only can the pieces be understood in any order, but they also overlap. Rather than striving for finite understandings, or to achieve “mastery,” collage creates spaces for play, a structural possibility for understanding something about the “spaces of enunciation” that might be possible.

We will explore some of the discursive strategies of collage, which are rooted in ambiguity about any sense of completeness. Instead, it is a form of representation whose hallmarks are it’s calling of attention to its own construction, and its refusal to bridge the gaps between its pieces. Collage is a form never certain of being whole, always broken but held together. What are some of the ways to tease out some of the underexplored potential of this broken frame for research?

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Paper short abstract

This paper addresses the landscapes and townscapes of the eastern English coastline moving anti-clockwise. Fieldwork is underpinned by analogue collage operations influenced by ideas of border aesthetics, assemblage theory, attention economy, mythogeography and the undercommons.

Paper long abstract

This paper addresses the landscapes and townscapes of the eastern English coastline during travels from south to north, moving anti-clockwise. I observe politics and materiality, the different communities, the lie of the land and the behaviour of light and weather along the coast. It is deemed to be unlucky to travel anti-clockwise, “widdershins” to use a witchy and old Scottish word. This work is underpinned by fieldwork and by notions of the operations of (analogue) collage which follow the aesthetics of the border, (Nail, 2016; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013, Schimanski and and Wolfe, Eds, 2017), assemblage theory (Buchanan, 2021, Parrry, 2022), attention economy (Watson, 2017), and mythogeography (Smith, 2010), and the undercommons (Harney and Moten, 2013). These are tactics to push for serendipitous clashes and revelation, wandering and seeking that sometimes incorporates poetry, painting and my own photography with magazine, secondhand books and found small objects and textures en-route. In this time of climate change and intense over-stimulation in media and relationships, I try to express the murkiness, gloaming and mixture of real / artificial illumination to address confusion and contested spaces and possible future imaginaries. This could be for example military / industry / ecology / tourism with various strategies such as horror or humour, sublime or cute, information made misleading through cut-up etc. Collage is a response to the sudden or smooth transitions of light and dark and relates to the human psyche as much as the landscape of travel and immersion in it.