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Paper short abstract

Sucúa Haven, is a collaborative project that lives at the border of Anthropology & Art, Ecuador & the US, fiction & nonfiction. Through staged photographs participants re-create memories, desires and alternative lives. It explores the Ecuadorian diaspora’s senses of belonging in Greater New Haven.

Paper long abstract

Sucúa Haven is a research-creation project that explores notions of belonging among Ecuadorians in New Haven, Connecticut (US). The name comes from Sucúa, a city in the Amazon where most collaborators originate.

Inspired by Jean Rouch’s ethnofictions and Augusto Boal’s concept of the Aesthetic Space, the project employs staged photography and storytelling to represent, reinhabit, and reimagine the memories, dreams, and alternative lives of its participants. These elements form a portrait of a unique territory: Sucúa Haven, a place that exists in the US but is also Ecuador—an Ecuador that both is and looks like an American suburb.

Through staged photographs, collaborators enter Boal’s aesthetic space—where fiction and reality blur—and engage with its properties of dichotomy, plasticity, and telemicroscopicity. This allows participants to dissociate from and reinterpret their own stories, crafting new narratives and characters that resemble but are not always themselves. It also brings “the distant” and “the absent” into presence, exploring how this community navigates belonging and isolation through translocal and transtemporal experiences and imaginaries.

This presentation will reflect on the methodological process, drawing on case examples to examine the aesthetic space’s properties. It will then explore the complementarity of performative, visual, and traditional methods in pursuing a shared anthropology. Finally, it will discuss the importance of memory and imagination as key dimensions for migrant studies, moving beyond material realities to consider less-explored aspects such as affects, longings, and desires.

Sucúa Haven was made possible through the support of Yale RITM’s Mellon Artist and Practitioner Fellowship.

https://www.vanessa-teran.com/main-labs-1