Representations of lived experience may be meticulous and articulated as in Lévi-Strauss writings and Hitchcock’s films, or expressed as excessive, ambiguous, marginalized, and repressed as evident in Roeg’s films and Lotman’s semiotics. The unique ways in which everyday life is audio-visually represented highlights the multiple realities and subjectivities that characterise our world. To understand the nuances of human experience, Deleuze and Guattari (1986) called for the production of “assemblages of collective enunciation” whereby participatory engagement with people and places operates as a hosting device for a multiplicity of subaltern beings and stories. This implies “taking seriously” the experiences of others (Viveiros de Castro, 2010) and realizing that representation is dynamic and political and thus, it creates new conditions of possibility and room for alter-ontologies (Ingawanij, 2013). Representations are not solely constructed through individual agency. Intersubjective relationships in collaborative practice, external entities in audio visual media, and the wider environment also shape the way that the world is perceived, represented, and lived in (see Harman, 2011; Sparrow, 2014; Torren 2014).
The conference will be held at the University of Manchester, 5-6th September 2019, presenting work of UK and international researchers, artists or students that undertake audio-visual research as part of their PhD. The conference keynote speakers will be Dr Catarina Alves Costa
My work is a visual-ethnographic study about growing up with a family member with a disability focused on creativity that lives within families. At the conference I would like to highlight some aspects of my second graphic project titled RE-TOUCHE.
My research concerns the audio-visual aesthetics of seeing and blindness in general and the phenomenological experience of determining the visually indeterminate in the blind from the sighted perspective in particular. I am currently working towards an audiovisual essay about the blind’s perceptual experience of Berlin, whereby it explores the inter-relation of seeing, blindness, imagination, and imagery in perception.
How can we through sound, image and participatory filmmaking create an open space and a new language about mental illness? A language that goes beyond illnesses, fixed boxes and diagnosis. At the conference I would like to invite you into the creation of a new short film with and about my good friend, Freja.
Qasim Riza Shaheen shares a series of Snapchat recordings in which he engages with the act of embodying the songs of playback singers and the mimetics of the actor in South Asian film cultures. In this presentation he uses the frame of social media applications as he queers and questions modes of representing power, love and desire.
In routine activities such as arranging one’s desk, maintenance of a bicycle, display of objects, packing up to move, I am interested in those moments where our everyday objects emerge into view and a moment of reflection and engagement is engendered: to acknowledge, to manifest emotions towards, to express gratitude for or disdain. This moment of recognition – what more does it tell us? What is its value? How might we respond further?
Sonic Images have their roots in pixel sonification, specifically mapping the sound frequencies of a recorded soundscape to pixels brightness and colors. Hovering over the picture with the mouse, the digital image is perceived as a physical object with its respective space and temporal dimension. I am working towards developing this interactive medium of audio exploration of visible and cultural environments and hope to contribute to extra textual frameworks of scholarly practices.
Why did we fall in love with anthropology and the Human being? Let’s make the others experience it!!! New audiovisual, immersive and interactive technologies can help visual anthropologist researchers to reach, impact or provoque a change in a wider audience when capturing and exhibiting human reality.
The project Umberto is working on is an ethnographic documentary about “Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo”, a civil resistance movement from Chiapas, Mexico, which has also been the subject of his PhD dissertation.
Where does individual movement come from? How does our inner landscape affect outer movement and vice versa? Using exploratory interview techniques and audiovisual methods, we engage the body and mind together in a philosophical film installation.
Peru was the centre of origin and diversity of more than 3,000 varieties of native potato—one of the most important food crops worldwide—however only around five types are typically consumed beyond the Andean towns. In the context of the Peruvian “Gastronomic Boom”, some native potato varieties are starting to be commercialised for their “native” properties and have thus become more widely consumed in Lima. The photobook is a photographic representation that aims to visualise the fragmented nature of this potato chain, from their growing sites in the Central Peruvian Andes to luxury restaurants in Lima.
Ten exploration workers from the oil and gas industry talk to camera for the first time in their life. As earth scientists, and as members of the energy industry, they claim a place to talk about their industry and its future. The film journeys from Brazil to Norway, unveiling different realities inside the oil industry as well as how oil workers negotiate, on a personal level and as members of their society, their ethical positions towards climate issues, renewable energies and the future of oil.
In Chile, people living with HIV fear stigma. Because of this, they conceal their condition and remain silent about what they are going through. ´This is my Face´ explores what happens when men living with the virus open up about the illness that changed their life trajectories by creating autobiographical photos. This film follows their creative process, from which emerged intimate images that challenge years of silence and misrepresentation.
“… ¡Y del barrio no me voy! […I won’t leave my neighbourhood!]” is a documentary that shows the perception and social ties of the people that have remained in the seven traditional neighbourhoods of San Luis Potosí, México, and that have resisted the pressures of a so-called modernisation. Along with the voices of local academics, it reveals the problems, challenges and misleading discourses of failed governments that have provoked the wear and tear of these spaces.
Serpari is the third piece of the series “Rituals and ancestral festivals of the Iberian Peninsula and Europe”. From the perspective of a snake we attend one of the most peculiar rituals in the area of Aquila, Italy dedicated to the Abbot San Domenico.
Jarramplas is the second piece of the series “Rituals and ancestral festivals of the Iberian Peninsula and Europe”. The origin of this ritual is uncertain. The inhabitants of the village of Piornal, Extremadura, Spain, play the role of a popular execution to an old cattle thief.
The documentary film Sacha Mamakuna – Mamás de la Selva tells how mothers from the Association of Women Midwives Kichwas from Alto Napo, AMUPAKIN learn from women’s knowledge and gifts (pajuyukhuna). The film tells stories about medicine, plants, midwifery and shamanism, and it shows how these women put into practice this knowledge, to reaffirm their status as Kichwa woman leaders. In a close, intimate and collaborative manner, their voices and practices are living accounts of collective resistance that reaffirm their identity and culture, a culture that faces complex changes due to modernity, state power, authorities, and the public health system. The documentary is part of a larger effort to instill the values of Kichwa practices and culture among the younger generations.
A journey to Mozambique in the search of a hidden story with an experimental use of film archives and a subjective narration. This documentary portrays Mar-got Dias, an ethnologist who filmed between 1958 and 1961 among the Makonde people in North Mozambique. The film is also around what we cannot see in the imag-es the ethnologist made, what is behind her. An inward journey that will gradually untie the circumstances in which these original films were made: during the period of Portuguese colonial rule of Mozambique. We use Margot’s unpublished diary and other texts she wrote, together with a subjective voice by the filmmaker to reflect on the ambivalence of this encounter.
Rather than hastily translating and interpreting repetitive bodily practices within a dementia context as pathological and abnormal, I approach them through a cartographic ethnography, with particular attention to the affective dynamics of repetition in a Jewish care home in London. Critically developing Deligny’s cartographic approach in dialogue with Ingold’s notion of dwelling, I demonstrate affect underpinned encounters and interactions of repetitive phenomena in terms of relational and affective affordance among those involved in the generation of a specific atmosphere at breakfast. Paper accepted for publication from Medicine, Anthropology and Theory.
Driving on the theoretical and epistemological significance of collective creative work with young Mapuche artists and intellectuals in Santiago (Chile), our work explores subversive aesthetics and imaginations as ways of producing meanings and knowledge. The site-specific theatre performance ‘Santiago Waria’ resulted from the exercise of thinking through the city, at the intersection of the materiality of urban space materiality and the immaterial practices, interpretations and lived experiences of the Mapuche diaspora.
Sound Graffiti is a series of installations of interactive sonic networks in urban areas. Walls are sprayed with sound and sensors, where multiple loudspeakers interact to express statements and harmonise with city and machinery sounds
“Divergent Sounds” explores the emergence of Estonian underground club scene and hiphop culture in the 1990s. Through the use of archival footage, Estonian underground music and recollections of DJs and musicians this documentary tells a story of post-socialist youth striving to create their own spaces of self-expression and music.
Through the testimony of Bea and her family, who lost their home in the magnitude 7.1 earthquake of September 19th two years ago, Magnitude 135 explores the profusion of challenges and injustices faced by the people of Morelos in the quake’s aftermath. The distinctive quality of Bea’s perspective stems from her synaesthesia, which, being a rare condition wherein cerebral pathways of sensory perception are intertwined, mirrors the interconnected and cumulative nature of the earthquake’s consequences. Numbers carry particularly strong sensory qualities for Bea, and listening to her unique description we discover the extent of lived experience and suffering that can hide within soundbite statistics, and we begin to understand the inadequacy of a simple numerical figure such as magnitude 7.1.
This is a short film based on my auto-ethnography as a chronically ill, working class woman that combines scenes filmed with my phone, drawings I have made, and material we have found on the internet. It has won the moving image prize of the Association for Medical Humanities. Research for this work was supported by the Estonian Research Council (Grant 1481), by the European Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence in Estonian Studies), and by the Foundation for Education and European Culture.
“Transmutation – The beating of the last looms | part 1”, is an social appeal about the problem of the disappearance of manual weaving, and the last weavers who still working. A multimedia work that crosses an anthropological view, in which through sound and image creates an artistic narrative, we will be able to identify the key moments of the creative process during the capture of sound and the different “cadences” of each instrument of textile production, as well as the interaction / look of the director with the last weavers and spinner.
Assembly is a reflexive documentary that meditates on working conditions in assembly plants (maquiladoras) in Ciudad Juárez (México). Shot by México and UK-based ethnographers and filmmakers 2015-2018, and edited and directed by Miguel Gaggiotti, it is part of the research project “Organising in the borderlands: applying research to support families, children and youngsters in Mexican-USA borderlands”.
