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- Convenor:
-
Juliet Brown
(National Film and Television School)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 4 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract
This panel explores how symbolic forms in film and art shape memory, identity, and power. From child-selves to holograms, horns, and heritage sites, the papers trace cultural legacies through multimodal practices.
Long Abstract
This panel brings together four interdisciplinary papers that examine how motifs and symbols - embodied, material, architectural, and aesthetic - carry legacies and shape collective memory in visual and multimodal media. Central to these enquiries is the way in which meaning is negotiated, reclaimed, and embodied through artistic and ethnographic forms.
Juliet Brown explores symbolic play in psychotherapy, tracing the transformation of the child-self across avatars, plasticine, and game engines, drawing on Susanne Langer’s theory of significant form. Julie Marsh presents a community-led filmmaking project with London’s Zoroastrian diaspora, using holographic ritual documentation to challenge static heritage models and engage living memory. Ma. Macrose Pascual reflects on how perceptions of horns - from symbols of good to evil - are shaped through cultural hegemony, media, and interactive pedagogical art. Finally, Sam Friedlander advocates for multimodal ethnography in representing Palestinian experience, employing videographic imitation and literary experimentation to foreground survivance and non-verbal legacies.
Together, the panel critically addresses how media and material practices are central to the transmission, contestation, and reimagination of cultural memory. By focusing on symbolic representation and its ethical, aesthetic, and political dimensions, the panel offers a vibrant contribution to multimodal anthropology, exploring how art and film mediate remembrance and identity in diverse socio-cultural landscapes.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Friday 4 July, 2025, -Paper short abstract
This project explores the symbol of the child-self as digital avatar, tactile plasticine figure, and in a game engine environment. It examines how material engagement and symbolic play in these forms support memory retrieval at the intersection of psychotherapy, documentary, and visual anthropology.
Paper long abstract
This research explores the effectiveness of the visual symbol of the child-self as a representation of a childlike aspect across various media forms. The study moves from realism toward blank symbolism, transitioning from digital representations to analogue forms, with particular focus on symbolic representation and materiality. Central to this exploration is the distinction between ‘significant motif’ and ‘significant form,’ concepts from Susanne Langer. Langer differentiates motifs as external representational devices and forms as embodied expressions carrying deeper cultural or personal meaning. This distinction frames the shift from digital avatars to the malleable, tactile medium of plasticine, considered a more potent medium for accessing embodied memories and deeper emotional resonance.
While avatars, as ‘significant motifs,’ aim to serve as realistic representations, they often fail to engage deeply with unconscious, embodied experiences. In contrast, working with abstract plasticine symbols, as a physical material form, facilitates a direct connection to the body and memory, offering an embodied symbolic form aligned with Langer’s notion of “unknown forms of sentience.” Through this lens, the study examines the role of materiality and embodied practice in cultural and psychological expression, suggesting plasticine’s tangible nature enables more profound, culturally resonant memory retrieval and symbolic exploration.
The final project stage involved transposing revolving squiggles - representing the child-self - from plasticine models into digital form and integrating them into an interactive documentary built within Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. User testing within this environment elicited a range of embodied memories, particularly related to movement and play.
Paper short abstract
This paper presents a collaboration with the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe based in their place of worship, a former art deco cinema. The research (re)presents ritual and spatial practices through immersive film installations, challenging static heritage narratives by centring community agency.
Paper long abstract
This paper presents a two-year collaboration with the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe (ZFTE) community at Rayners Lane, a former cinema transformed into a vibrant place of worship. This transformation forms the foundation of a site-specific artistic research project that investigates how diaspora faith communities creatively adapt disused cinemas into sacred spaces. Central to the research is the methodology of site-integrity, a collaborative, site-specific approach that documents and re-presents community practices through performative film installations.
The paper explores how interactive workshops and collaborative filmmaking fostered intergenerational dialogue and enhanced community engagement throughout the research. This process culminated in the co-creation of motorised recording/playback devices that synchronise recorded footage with architectural features, generating holographic illusions that capture the essence of ritual practice. These installations move beyond traditional documentaries, acting as immersive, performative tools that engage both the tangible heritage of the cinema’s architecture and the intangible cultural practices of the community.
The paper examines how this artistic research challenges static narratives of cultural heritage by enabling faith communities to document and analyse their lived experiences, fostering a nuanced, inclusive understanding that reflects evolving social and cultural dynamics. It offers innovative strategies for safeguarding multicultural narratives while also highlighting the crucial role of community-led initiatives in fostering inclusivity in heritage practices.
This work forms part of a larger RIBA-funded project, Moving Pictures: Reusing Cinemas as Places of Worship in the Diaspora, co-led with architectural historian Kate Jordan.
Paper short abstract
The research explores symbols like horns across times and spaces using the frameworks of critical public pedagogy and multimodal ethnography. It argues that symbols are not mere decorative elements, rather active agents in human learning processes, influencing how individuals engage with the world.
Paper long abstract
The research advocates an interdisciplinary approach within the fields anthropology and education in the understanding the meaning-making processes of individuals across times and spaces. It highlights the transformative impact of symbols such as horns through the exploration of various field-sites and methods. The study reveals how meanings attached to horns are embodied and reflected through multiple lenses. Its multimodal ethnographic methods namely the Representative Art, Site-Specific Art Installation, Interactive Art Installation, and Collaborative Art have revealed a multi-faceted aspects of human being encompassing creative processes, expressions, imaginations, memories, personal or shared experiences, religious teachings, histories, traditions, environment, society, political views, and among others. This collaborative research nature, moreover, fosters cross-cultural discourses associated to a single symbol grounded in the framework of Critical Public Pedagogy. With such, challenges traditional learning environment and human-centered views of knowledge while inviting the complexities of individuals in making sense of their milieu. Furthermore, the study offers a further avenue of exploration of both the known and unknown as well as individual and collective perspectives, hence, fostering a non-isolated, rather reflexive collaborative environment.
Paper short abstract
This paper argues for the importance of multimodal creative productions as sufficient and essential sources for cultural analysis in anthropological research. Focusing on Palestine, experimental prose as an art review is used here to reapproach the intrinsic task of recounting Palestinian legacies.
Paper long abstract
Edward Said wrote in 1994 “without the practice of a national culture--from slogans to pamphlets and newspapers, from folktales and heroes to epic poetry, novels, and drama--the language is inert; national culture organizes and sustains communal memory…” By neglecting non-material, non-verbal, and often unwritten products of a given culture, the contextual basis of ethnographic analysis is consequently obscured. This paper argues for the importance of film and literary productions as sufficient and essential sources for cultural analysis in anthropology, welcoming various unconventional artistic representations as viable mediums to understand and represent culture across contexts.
Challenging paradigms of professional legitimacy within anthropology, this paper seeks to make use of creative mediums to more effectively represent and analyze experiences across cultures, attempting to understanding art forms through artistic imitation and flattery. Such approaches seek to perfect ethnographic inquiry by engaging with living mediums of art as electric testimonies to the forces of cultural productivity. Without representing these unconventional examples—and approaching them with equal artistic passion and merit—the theoretical and thick descriptive language “is inert.” Focusing on the case of Palestine, multiple mediums will be represented by flirting with the given art form itself during the analytical process, imitating literary prose to understand experiences of survivance and identity; an essential element of the intrinsic task of re-calling Palestinian legacies.