The aim of this event was to channel and showcase new perspectives and approaches that visual practitioners, practice researchers, and visual ethnographers were employing in their work. In order to enrich visual practices toward new disciplinary horizons, we advocated for a visual, sonic, experimental, and more widely multisensory cross-disciplinary knowledge.
The VRN Residency Conference aimed to bring together visual researchers and practitioners, who were actively working with visual methods in their own fieldwork or their practice-as-research. It welcomed participants from a variety of disciplines, including visual anthropology, filmmaking, music, fine arts, performance arts, animation, and photography.
The event was composed of a five-day residency open to 12 participants, a 2-day conference including participants of the residency and external presenters.
The Residency: 29th August to 3rd September in the Peak District
The Conference: 5th and 6th September 2019 at the University of Manchester
During a five-day residency, participants inhabited a shared creative and living space at an appropriate location, and worked on their own visual materials to enhance the narrative of their research. More importantly, they worked collaboratively in the pursuit of pushing creative boundaries through experimental methods. The five-day residency became a space for collective learning and artistic creation in which experiences from respective projects were shared and gave rise to new and unforeseen practical outcomes.
The two-day conference sought not only to explore and debate the long-standing legacies of audio-visual research but wanted to create a productive and inspiring discussion through active and embodied involvement. This ensured that every participant could effectively express and communicate their practice through multisensorial, emplaced, participatory, embodied, experimental, and collaborative approaches. Filmmaker and researcher Dr. Catarina Alves Costa delivered that year’s keynote speech.
The Residency Conference is organized by Lana, Anna, Amber, Stefania, Eduard, Ally Alex Jess, Ian, Clara, Ben, Eugenio and Paloma.
This event is funded by the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, the AHRC North West Consortium, the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Manchester, Digital Humanities, Methods North West, Methods@Manchester, ArtsMethods@Manchester, and Manchester Metropolitan University.
