Abstrakt
This contribution will think through the movement between fieldwork site and 'back home', as the two become increasingly materially inseparable within a world of constant connectivity (Ohm). The audio-visual work will draw on (post-)ethnographic visual codes as filtered through an internet aesthetic.
The goal is to compose it in such a way as to present a world that is always already mediated and where any neat divisions are but analytic tools, where neither the field, nor home, nor media representations have a primacy. One where movement/exchange between elements is constant.
Motion in anthropological research (which most directly informs my work) is made of three entangled displacements: physical (between site and 'back home'), conceptual (encounters with other worlds), temporal (the distance between noticing, writing, thinking). In short, reality as becoming-different with the researcher being positioned in between (Wagner).
What comes as a challenge is to express such conceptual thought audio-visually, so that the artifact produces (spiritual) movement in the viewers that will not settle back onto a simple separation between worlds. Neither part, nor whole (Viveiros & Goldman).
That is, to shape an object (by making, choosing and arranging images) that would act as an 'ethnographic moment' (Strathern), that is a joining of observation and analysis. Such a relation is ever evolving, or as Strathern writes, it "is a moment of knowledge or insight, denotes a relation between immersement and movement." Within these movements, the ethnographer's body and the viewer's body are marked as absences, even as the tools, objects, assemblages created through research act as orientations (Ahmed) for movement.
Thus, apart from the screening, I will elaborate on somatic motive positioning enacted or conceptually effectuated by these problematics. For the body, the self, emerging from these relations, also undergoes motion.
And different encounters provoke different movements.