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Paper short abstract

This paper shares the experience of a creative research residency in collaborative audiovisual anthropology designed to renew our ethnographic engagement. It focuses on creating collaborative audiovisual works and cultivating protective and caring spaces within neoliberal academic settings.

Paper long abstract

This paper shares the experience of a creative research residency in collaborative audiovisual anthropology. Its first edition, titled “Woman, Land, and Memory” and coordinated by Andrea Chamorro Pérez (University Tarapacá), Doris Aguilera Santos (Aymara Association Chacha Warmi), and myself (University of Los Lagos), took place in 2024 in Arica, Northern Chile.

The residency is designed to creatively address the challenges of limited time and resources in pursuing meaningful collaborative audiovisual practice within neoliberal academia. Andrea and her team (from the northernmost university in Chile) and I with mine (from the southernmost anthropology department) worked intensively for about 15 days with communities we have longstanding connections to, producing an audiovisual piece intended for both academic and non-academic audiences. The resulting work belongs collectively to the organization and to us.

Each year, one team will have a longstanding connection with the protagonists, while for the other, the film project will mark the first collaboration with them. We aim to foster diverse, situated perspectives, “speaking nearby” (Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 1989) the protagonists. The residency, as a field device, challenges our ethnographic skills while highlighting the sympoietic (Donna Haraway, 2016) nature of life, fieldwork, and audiovisual creation. Our goal is to renew and expand our ethnographic engagement, creating a caring space within academia for ourselves and the people we work with—casting circles of care that protect us from our insalubrious milieu without isolating us from the work to be done (Isabelle Stengers, 2018).