Conference
Ethnography-based Art Practices: Changing the Future of Fieldwork
2-4 June 2016 – Coimbra, Portugal
Ethnographic-based art practices are opening up alternative possibilities for doing fieldwork, by involving different senses and deploying assorted strategies and media. This panel welcomes interdisciplinary approaches and hybrid interventions: from academic papers to installations, and audio-visual and/or social interventions in the public space, and the space of the academy.
Abstract:
Rethinking ethnographic practices is urgent for different reasons: from their instrumental and perverse uses for corporative purposes and State governmentality to its association to critical forms of art and politics of exhibition. Beyond naturalistic approaches to conducting fieldwork based on romantic and idealized versions of power relations between “natives” and ethnographer, ethnographic-based art practices are opening up alternative possibilities for doing fieldwork as deliberate interventions for the production of ethnographic knowledge in the field by involving different senses and deploying assorted strategies and media. Issues of “curatorial design,” and “paracuratorial” strategies, for instance, are serving to think about possible futures for methodology and theory in anthropology. This panel welcomes interdisciplinary approaches from art, anthropology, science, technology, visual ethnography, and media studies that are based in ethnographic processes and work against mere discussions on representation. A paradigm shift on teaching anthropology – based on some of these premises – is another aspect to be considered. Interventions could be of a hybrid nature: from academic papers to installations, and audio-visual and/or social interventions in the public space, and the space of the academy.
