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Paper short abstract

This paper considers visual methods that materially involve landscapes in collaborative processes of image making and knowledge production. Reflecting on an ongoing art project with land workers in UK, I explore the methodological affordances of cameras built with materials from given landscapes.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I will consider experimental visual methodologies that involve landscapes as active partners in collaborative processes of image making and knowledge production. I discuss the development of a creative research practice that explores stories of land work amongst small-scale, first-generation and community farmers in the UK. Sharing reflections from recent and ongoing work, I will explore the methodological affordances and limitations of visual methods that actively embrace the inventiveness and materiality of photography. My practice as a photographer-anthropologist follows Sarah Pink’s proposal for ethnographers to develop similar, parallel or related practices to those people whose experiences they seek to understand (2009). The project unfolds through a series of large format pinhole cameras built using materials from a given landscape – grasses, crop residues, tree stumps, mud, straw bales. Through the co-creation of participants’ portraits, these ‘land cameras’ become ‘fieldwork devices’ – opportunities to work together towards matters of shared concern (Estalella & Sanchez Criado, 2018). If – to paraphrase Marilyn Strathern (1992) – it matters what landscape relations we use to think other landscape relations with, how might collaborating with plant, animal and other materials from the landscape enable me to better understand my subjects’ own embodied and sensory experiences of place? How might an orientation towards the twin materialities of land and photography enable me and participants to develop alternative sensibilities, perspectives, and practices of attention? Furthermore, how do the contingencies, temporalities and historical resonances of pinhole camera photography shape fieldwork relationships and the co-production of knowledge?

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Paper short abstract

This experimental multimedia project aims to understand traditional water management practices in Southern Morocco. On paper & Digital8 format this project tracks the traditions of indigenous water management and the socio-political crises of liberalization of wells in the face of climate change.

Paper long abstract

This multimedia project aims to serve as both an ends and a means to understanding traditional water management practices in the arid climate of Southern Morocco. Using different cases from villages in the Tiznit area, this project both documents the traditions of indigenous water management practices as well as the socio-political crises surrounding the liberalization of wells in the face of climate change.

By being filmed on analog Digital 8 format, my ethnographic approach aims to illuminate the filmmakers gaze, highlighting my own sentiments and presence in the process. By choosing a medium that to many is very nostalgic and personal being used in home videos, the film serves the dual purpose of associating a personal connection with the subjects whilst establishing a backdrop of real memory which makes the subject both a reality that is personally affecting. This would accomplish the goal of highlighting our own interpretations by shocking the audience with the ever-familiar via the medium and "home video" shooting style. While the subject is humanized, the grainy dreaminess of the footage also embraces the "filter" through which we view the world. The tape is a representation of a memory which is strikingly familiar as well as a foggy symbolization of viewers' and filmmaker's gaze on the subject.

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Paper short abstract

Based on the deconstruction of the term “Pigmy” and the intersectional strategies employed, the related ethnofiction practice highlights the power relations that unite the participants of the multi-sited fieldwork in the Republic of the Congo and interprets the resulting co-construction of meanings.

Paper long abstract

This paper is the result of a multi-sited ethnographic visual research carried out in the Republic of the Congo on the daily life of the BaBongo “Pygmy” communities in Point-Noire and in the departments of Lékoumou and Bouenza.

The production of the resulting docu-film, "Bongo Miscellany", highlighted the different levels of participation and proxemic distance between the visual ethnographer and the subjects involved in the fieldwork, highlighting the complexity of constructing a shared narrative within a neo-colonial framework.

In this regard, the adoption of an intersectional approach allowed for the denaturalisation of one's own and the participants' positioning within the corresponding network of power relations. Furthermore, it allowed for the interpretation of the claims of the partecipants involved (NGOs, local communities, collaborators, the ethnographer) within the ethnographic knowledge construction process, establishing correspondences between individual and collective trajectories and the broader transnational framework. Finally, it has shown how adherence to identity categories (Pygmy, Bantu, European, Congolese, Social Worker, Muntu, Mundele, Kento) determined beliefs and behaviours and thus influenced the shared construction of knowledge.

The intersectional strategy thus made it possible to represent the singularities of the partecipants involved, catalysing their expectations in a process of co-construction of the filmic narrative that gradually dissolved participant observation into ethnofiction praxis.

Despite the difficulties, this experiment has confirmed the possibility of creating theoretical tools functional for the construction of shared meanings. These tools are compatible with an academic practice capable of creating unexpected alliances and mutual trust.