Ethnography-based art. Undisciplined dialogues and creative research practices. An Introduction

Art-Based Ethnography

Experimental Practices of Fieldwork

Issue edited by Chiara Pussetti

Angelo Romano, Università della Basilicata, Italy Irene Salerno, Università della Basilicata, Italy

Film Review Editor

Francesco Dragone, USA

Photo Essay Editor

Pietro Meloni, Università di Siena, Italy

Editorial Board

Letizia Bindi, Università del Molise, Italy

Sylvia Caiuby Novaes, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Catalina Cortes Severino, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia Maria Luisa Ciminelli, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy

Sylvaine Conord, France

Elizabeth Edwards, De Montfort University, United Kingdom Paolo Silvio Harald Favero, University of Antwerp, Belgium Francesco Faeta, Università di Messina, Italy

Steven Feld, University of New Mexico, United States Annalisa Frisina, Università di Padova, Italy

Anna Grimshaw, Emory University, United States Melinda Hinkson, Deakin University, Australia Ferdinando Mirizzi, Università della Basilicata, Italy

Vincenzo Padiglione, Università di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy Sarah Pink, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, Australia Thierry Roche, Université Université d’Aix-Marseille, France

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Summary

ARTICLES

Chiara Pussetti

Ethnography-based art. Undisciplined dialogues and creative research practices. An Introduction.

p. 1

Zoe Bray

Ethnographic Portrait-Painting Today: Opening Up the Process at NYC’s American Natural History Museum

p. 13

Lydia Nakashima Degarrod

Activating and Performing Nostalgia at Places of Sorrowful Exile p. 34

Tomasz Rakowski and Ewa Rossal

Artisans, Alcoholics and Artists: In Search of Descriptions of Experimental Ethnographic Realities

p. 52

Giuliana Borea

Expanded Fieldwork: In-site Arenas, the Actant Archive and the Sensorial Studio p. 66

Catalina Cortes Severino

Exploraciones desde “lo visual”, la imagen y la escritura p. 84

PHOTO-ESSAY

Chiara Pussetti and Vitor Barros

Photos from the Field. Thinking immigrants’ therapeutic itineraries through

ethnography-based art

p. 105

out of topic

PHOTO-ESSAYS

The Three Cities of Beijing p. 125

Julien Dugnoille

How an image makes people move: Symbolic reality, civil disobedience and skills training on and off the stage of an Oxford University Theatre Production

p. 138

Amar Wahab

Indentureship’s Ghostworld: Re-imagining the Coolie Archive p. 153

out of topic

VIDEO

Moi, un noir. Reloaded p. 172

FILM REVIEW

Sacred Mountains. Abrahamic Religions and Musical Practices in the Mediterranean Area

By Nicola Scaldaferri Review by Diego Pani

p. 174

BOOK RECEIVED

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1

Ethnography-based art. Undisciplined dialogues and creative

research practices. An Introduction.

Chiara Pussetti

This special issue is the result of conversations around ethnography-based artistic practices and art-based research methods, initiated on occasion of a workshop held at the VI Congress of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology (APA) in June 2016. The ambition of the artists, anthropologists, performers, designers and curators gathered there was to explore explicit combinations and convergences between artistic and curatorial practices and ethnographic processes, dissolving boundaries in order to defend a more experimental approach to ethnographic representation, privileging art-based, participatory and collaborative research as methods. This dossier situates itself in the blurred zone between anthropology, visual arts, and the new possibilities for conducting and communicating our research, moving across – and defying - academic borders.

Keywords

Ethnography-based art, methodology, experimentation, collaborative knowledge, representation.

Chiara Pussetti

(PhD in Cultural Anthropology, University of Turin, Italy, 2003) has lectured at graduate and post-graduate levels in Italy, Portugal, and Brazila and has published extensively in the subjects of Anthropology of Body and Emotions, Medical Anthropology, Visual Anthropology and Migration Studies. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on body and emotions; public health policy; representations of race and racism; social vulnerability, exclusion and discrimination in Guinea Bissau, Portugal and Brazil. She is presently Post-doc Researcher of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Professor Aníbal de Bettencourt 9, 1600-189 Lisboa, Portugal. FCT Scholarship SFRH/BPD/95998/2013) and member of Board of Directors of the EBANO Collective (Ethnography-based Art Nomad Organization). From 2007, as anthropologist, artist and curator, she has coordinated 10 national and 6 international projects. Currently, she coordinates as PI for ICS-ULisboa the project ROCK (www.rockproject.eu Funding: Horizon 2020 Innovative Action SC5-21 Cultural Heritage as a Driver for Sustainable Growth, 2017-2019; Lead Applicant: Comune di Bologna).

This special issue is the result of conversations around ethnography-based artistic practices and art-based research methods, initiated on occasion of a workshop held at the VI Congress of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology (APA) at Coimbra University Institute in June 2016 (Ethnography-Based Art Practices: Changing the Future of work). As the workshop convener, I had called for critical and creative reflections on art-based fieldwork practices and on ethnography-based artistic experimentations. The tremendous attention this panel gathered clearly attests to the growing interest in combining ethnographic inquiries with artistic practice, as well as on the use of the imaginative, creative and exploratory methods in anthropological research.

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2 The adoption of creative and experimental research methodological tools to revise ethnographic perceptions of the field clearly echoes the recent discussions on the transformation of the norm and form of fieldwork (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Pink et al. 2004, 2010; Faubion and Marcus 2009; Marcus 2010a, 2010b, 2012; Spencer and Davies 2010; Fabian 1983; Ingold 2013, 2014; Mjaaland 2009; Lamphere 2018) which derive from the critique of textual representations in anthropology conducted by Clifford and Marcus in the highly influential volume Writing Culture in 1986.

The crisis of representation, which followed the publication of this groundbreaking book, opened new perspectives for the articulation between art and science. Conventional forms of representing other communities in anthropology - the radical “othering” (Fabian 1983) - have since become subject to deep questioning, which has considerably altered the very practice of ethnography. From being an authoritative and uncritical form of describing and presenting the information collected in the field, it came to be conceived as a mode of presentation in which the perspective of the ethnographic writer is implicated within the observation, and the gaze of those who are the object of ethnography expresses a critique of the power relations implicit in research itself (Krieger 1985; Rabinow 1985).

A growing literature on the potential of intersections between ‘art’ and ‘anthropology’ has been reshaping in recent years the debate on knowledge production and ethnographic methods and practices (Sullivan 2005; Calzadilla and Marcus 2006; Schneider 2008; Downey 2009; Leavy 2009; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010, 2013; Ingold 2011, 2013; Strohm 2012; Rutten, Van. Dienderen, and Soetaert 2013a; Rutten, Van. Dienderen, and Soetaert 2013b). Much of this literature advocates a stronger engagement with a sensorial, emotional, person-centred and postcolonial representations of the field, instigating discussions about how creative or experimental collaborations between ethnographers, curators and artists can be useful in the research process (Grimshaw 2001; Svasek 2007; Crawford 2008; Kester 2008; Downey 2009; Greverus and Ritschel 2009; Campbell 2011; Brodine et al. 2011; Errington, S. 2012; Rutten 2017; Hamer 2016; Estalella and Sánchez Criado 2018).

The essays contained in this dossier, presenting the concrete practices of fieldwork, expose some of the fundamental themes of this debate and, in particular, the intricate relationship between content and form, claiming the fundamental importance of aesthetic in anthropological enterprise. The researchers that have collaborated in this publication don’t propose their creative practices as (artistic) illustrations (or forms) of their (scientific) ethnographic works (or contents). Rather, they interpret these aesthetic tools as constitutive of the very ethnographic knowledge. The process of understanding puts continuously into play, without being mutually exclusive, observation, impression, interpretation, imagination, emotion and experimentation.

In other articles, I have reflected on the connexion between scientific and artistic production, discussing if and why anthropology seems less scientific when it uses creative research methodologies and aesthetic communication styles (Pussetti 2013a; 2013b; 2015; 2016a; 2016b; 2017). I have dialogued extensively with other scholars about the epistemological distinction between art and science, between fiction and reality, beautiful and true, subjective and objective, speculating about crossing the disciplinary border between art and anthropology (Clarke 2014), arguing that it is no longer necessary for images to respect realistic standards of truthfulness to be “crude testimony of what is

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3 happening” (Barthes 1987: 135), describing the world as it “really is”, or “‘documents’ for ‘capturing’ what is ‘out there’ - proofs of the ‘authentic’ contact with the ‘lived reality’ of the others” (Favero 2014: 86).

Creating images that “seem real, in the model of scientific realism of photography" (Machado 1995: 59) is just an option, a manipulation, a construction of realistic inspiration (Edwards 2011; Hammond 1998). It is a fiction - in its etymological sense of invention, imagination (Clifford 1997: 31), and of creative act (Geertz 1973: 23), which reveals the will and the aesthetic decision of the author. Ethnographic work recognizes its fictional side, as a “system of truth shaped by power and history (…) inherently partial-committed and incomplete” (Clifford 1986: 6-7), thus legitimately incorporating artistic practice in the production of knowledge. “Rethinking the articulations between realism and expressionism” (Edwards 1997: 54) and, thus, between anthropology and art, the essays in this dossier rethink fieldwork considering it as, above all, a relational process at the same time emotional, cognitive, sensorial and aesthetic. Following the suggestions of Anna Grimshaw, I advocate for an artful anthropology (Carrithers et al. 1990: 273), inviting anthropologists to combine their ethnographic inquiries with artistic practice, considering art and anthropology as analogous practices (Grimshaw 2001).

The goal during those three days in Coimbra was not, however, merely to discuss the ethnographic turn in contemporary art (Foster 1995; Rutten, Van. Dienderen, and Soetaert 2013a; Rutten, Van. Dienderen, and Soetaert 2013b; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005; Rutten 2016, 2017; Takaragawa & Halloran 2017) and the sensory turn in anthropology (MacDougall 1997; Heller 2005; Edwards 2006; Pink 2001, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2013; Hjorth and Sharp 2014)1_.

The ambition of the artists, anthropologists, performers, designers and curators gathered there was, rather, to explore explicit combinations and convergences between artistic and curatorial practices and ethnographic processes, dissolving boundaries in order to defend a more experimental approach to ethnographic representation, privileging art-based, participatory and collaborative research as methods. This dossier situates itself in the blurred zone between anthropology, visual arts, and the new possibilities for conducting and communicating our research, moving across – and defying - academic borders.

Lydia Nakashima Degarrod – who examines the emergence of different forms of nostalgia during the collaborative production of videos about exile among nine Chilean political refugees living in California; and Zoe Bray – who reflects on conventional representational forms, norms and politics, based on an ethnographic portrait-painting encounter (a curatorial experiment in which the author took part, invited by the collective “Ethnographic Terminalia” at the American Natural History Museum) - are both visual artists and anthropologists. Using innovative methods, these two authors extend the borders of anthropology into the terrain of the arts, occupying a very compelling double role as both anthropologists and artists, and engaging in a debate not only about the

1

The ethnographic turn and sensory ethnography have become the impetus to re-examine anthropology as a discipline, its boundaries, and its epistemologies. In 2013, a double special issue of Critical Arts (issues 27[5] and 27[6]) was themed ‘Revisiting the ethnographic turn in contemporary art’. These special issues reawakened interest in the experimental research practices situated ‘at the intersection’ of art and ethnography.

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4 articulation between art and anthropology in the creation of alternative epistemologies, but also about the outsider-insider status of the ethnographer in the production of investigation-creation projects.

Tomasz Rakowskiand and Ewa Rossal present in their essay three artistic-ethnographic collaborative research projects - at the intersection between art, ethnography, and social practice - contributing to an on-going theoretical and methodological reformulation of ethnographic practices and devices, which has been defined by Estaella and Sanchéz Criado as “experimental collaborations” (2018). Also Catalina Cortes Severino reflects on the articulation between anthropology, the social and the visual having an artistic ethnographic collaborative research project as the starting point, in order to rethink the relationship between domestic spaces and the production of subjectivities.

The essay of the anthropologist and art curator Giuliana Borea highlights the sensorial-material-visual experiences that unfold in the anthropologist’s studio bringing closer the field, the visual and the text, by focusing on the notion of “expanded fieldwork” and illustrating the whole process of “thinking through making” (Ingold 2013) in the production of anthropological knowledge.

Our meeting in Coimbra also included collaborative and participative artistic interventions, exhibitions, performances and installations that dialogued empirically with the conference location, reflecting and adding critical depth to the very materiality of the field. The APA Congress took place both in the Department of Life Sciences and in the evocative Botanical Garden of the University of Coimbra. The conference panels were held in the Department classrooms, whose space is still marked by the courses of colonial ethnography (Ferraz de Matos 2013: 124) and physical and biological anthropology linked to the history of Late Imperial Portugal (Santos 2012): humans skeletons hang near the blackboard, the drawers of the school desks are full of human bones, the corridors are occupied by diverse objects, artefacts and anthropological findings collected during colonial expeditions in the Portuguese overseas possessions. The Botanical Garden emerged in the heart of the city in 1772, by the initiative of the Marques de Pombal, as a consequence of the European expansion of the XV century. The contact with exotic plants and animals stimulated interest in its study: the purpose of the Garden was thus to collect medicinal plant and exotic species, brought back from Portuguese colonies in order to supplement the study of medicine and natural history at the University of Coimbra.

This special location allowed us to reflect on how artistic exhibits are at risk of reproducing colonial representations; for instance, by exploiting collaboration without leaving room for other voices, new experiences and interpretations, merely speaking in the name of the others. Organizing collaborative artistic interventions in this very unique venue, using a postcolonial theoretical framework as analytical support, our goal was to invite the conference participants to anthropologically observe the space around them, in order to critically reassess the norms and politics of representation of the colonial period and to rethink epistemologically and ethically the production of a reflexive, sensitive, historical, person-centred, self-conscious, ethical and political postcolonial anthropological gaze. On this occasion, we discussed the ethnography-based art exhibition

Woundscapes, displayed in 2012 through collaborative processes (see the Photo Essay in

this dossier), as an example of a postcolonial aesthetic practice, referring to the collaborative search for a pragmatic approach to expose and overthrow established

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5 racialized social, economic and political hierarchies, offering more than a one-dimensional view.

Woundscapes resulted from a multi-layered and cross-disciplinary collaborative project involving immigrants, artists and anthropologists - and often “Immigrant

AnthroPoArtists” (Favero 2009) - in which the subjects of research became agents in the

production of knowledge and the public was included not as passive viewers but rather as active participants in understanding and interpreting the possible paths that constituted the exhibition. We discussed how the introduction of multiple voices and perspectives and of various formats of collaborative productions - revealing the points-of-view of the people involved and getting an opportunity to all the participants involved to have a voice in the process - can be an effective way to disrupt linear authoritative narratives. The last communication of the Coimbra conference was dedicated to problematizing the post-colonial critique of representation and questioning the promises of decolonization of (aesthetic) narratives, with the presence of the curators and some of the artists/anthropologists/immigrants who had participated in the Woundscapes exhibition.

After this conference, in the same month, I organized a summer school at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon dedicated to Artistic Practices and Curatorial

Experiences in Anthropology, which further stimulated this debate. During the summer

school, we presented and discussed many of the ethnographic, curatorial and artistic experiences gathered in this volume. In particular we reflected critically on participatory public art projects supported by ethnographic research and on curatorial practices at the intersection(s) of art and anthropology.

In the summer school I could count on the collaboration, as teachers, of Professor Lydia Nakashima Degarrod and Professor Giuliana Borea (in this volume) and on the curatorial experiences of the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective (ETC)2– represented by the anthropologist and curator Fiona McDonald – and of the EBANO Collective3_{, of which I am a} founding member. During the summer school we compared and discussed alternative possibilities for doing fieldwork, by involving different senses and deploying assorted strategies and media and provided a practical learning based on the participation in the organization of an experimental street art project, claiming the place of ‘art’ with fragments of ethnography, and the place of ethnography with ‘artistic’ objects.

All the authors invited to participate in this volume had already collaborated with either ETC (Zoe Bray, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod) or EBANO (Ewa Rossal, Tomasz Rakowski, Giuliana Borea, Catalina Cortes Severino) on diverse occasions, exchanging curatorial experiences, delineating a similar vision of ethnography as a possible ground for art inspiration and production (ethnography-based art), and of artistic practices as

2

Since 2009, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the collective Ethnographic Terminalia has curated annual group shows of the work of anthropologists who make art and of artists who engage with anthropological theories and methods. (www.ethnographicterminalia.org).

3

EBANOCollective (Ethnography-Based Art Nomad Organization) is an artistic and curatorial collective that, since 2013, proposes to carry out site-specific projects and urban interventions through art supported by ethnographic research. Through the collaboration of artists and social scientists, EBANO develops participatory projects of public art tackling local community issues and larger social and urban questions.(www.ebanocollective.org)

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6 involved in both the acquisition and the transmission of ethnographic knowledge (art-based ethnography). Among those many occasions, I would like here to remember in particular the organization of the ethnography-based art exhibition Woundscapes in 2013 organized by EBANO at the Museum of Lisbon; the artistic residence “Exhibition as Residency—Art, Anthropology, Collaboration”, organized by ETC at the Arts Incubator in Washington Park, Chicago, held in November 2013 in conjunction with the American Anthropological Association (AAA); and the conference “Estudios y Encuentros entre

Antropología y Arte” organized by Giuliana Borea in 2014 at the Pontifical Catholic

University of Peru. I would like to remember these events that allowed me to know most of the authors who accepted the invitation to participate in this volume, thanking my colleagues for these wonderful opportunities of collaboration and for their generosity in sharing their reflections and research.

I would like finally to talk about another workshop, which proved to be fundamental not only for the collaborations that it has allowed, but above all for the reflections that have arisen from it and that are reflected in this dossier. In July 2017, as EBANO and as researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, I collaborated on the organization of the first International Workshop of the #Colleex EASA4 _{network, aimed} at opening a space for debate and intervention around experimental forms of ethnographic fieldwork. This workshop was dedicated to explore the infrastructures, spaces, forms of relationship, methods, and techniques required to inject an experimental sensibility in fieldwork. During three days, in the evocative setting of the Lisbon Tropical Botanical Garden, anthropologists, curators and artists have discussed and performed their fieldwork practices and their creative experimental methodologies.

Even more so than in the Coimbra venue, the Lisbon Tropical Botanical Garden was a centre for colonial experimentation and study, especially oriented towards the recollection of the botanical and agricultural diversity in the Portuguese Empire. In 1940, the Garden – called at that time the Colonial Garden - played an important role during the Portuguese World Exhibition, a huge propaganda event for the celebration of the Empire, hosting the colonial section and sculpture reproductions of indigenous heads from all the colonial territories. With Portuguese ethnography at its peak as ‘handmaiden of colonialism’, the Colonial Garden5 _{became one of the major sites for Colonial Studies as} well as a miniaturised representation of the empire itself. This place - loaded with a heavy story – provided a great venue for sharing our methodological anxieties and creative reflections, being itself a site that triggers all kinds of considerations about artistic experimentations, (post)colonial representations, poetics and politics of ethnographic fieldwork. The intense contact during the #Colleex days with an artistic and cultural heritage site dedicated to the representation of the colonial ‘Other’6 _{stimulated a} discussion on nowadays fieldwork processes and on ‘decolonising’ representational practices (Smith 1999).

4 _{European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA).}

5 _{The Garden adopted different designations through time: initially Colonial Garden, then Garden and}

Colonial Agricultural Museum (1944), Ultramar Garden in the 1950s and finally Tropical Agricultural Museum and Garden, integrated in the Museum of Natural History and Science (MUHNAC) and the

Lisbon Botanic Garden of the University of Lisbon.

6 _{The garden alternates areas of sparse and thick vegetation with structures built in 1940 for the Colonial} Section of the Portuguese World Exhibition representing the varying morphological characters of the colonized people of Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia.

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7 This special issue intended to build on the outcomes of all these meetings, reporting ideas, practices and processes that have proved important to reconsider the production of anthropological knowledge through the use of experimental and creative research methods. The collaborations and conversations carried out during these years among the authors invited to this dossier converged into emphasizing the importance of highlighting the process instead of celebrating the final outcome - the exhibition or the artwork. All the articles here collected put the empirical work we do as anthropologists and/or artists on display, as it is the interactive process of on-going questioning, learning and discussing that leads to the construction of new knowledge and mutual understanding.

Looking at artistic processes as methodological devices, the authors gathered in this dossier analyse their own epistemic practices of fieldwork, exploring when and how artistic or curatorial practices can contribute to the anthropological research, allowing novel forms of ethnographic knowledge. Their contributions illustrate that art practices can be used in fieldwork in order to: 1) access new arenas, challenging topics and complex empirical fields and overpass social barriers, facilitating social interaction and cultural encounter (see Rakowskiand and Rossal) 2) capture the non-verbal dimensions of being, going beyond the words, exploring the unspoken and grasping emotional, sensorial and internal imaginary worlds (see Lydia Nakashima Degarrod); 3) re-examine anthropology as a discipline, discussing its boundaries and epistemologies and re-think ethnography as an empirical practice and a relational process, challenging and subverting authoritative relationships between ‘observer’ and ‘observed’ (see Zoe Bray and Giuliana Borea); and finally 4) to communicate in a more effective way the multisensorial lived experiences of the field, making space for a multiplicity of voices to be heard, transforming informants and spectators into active knowledge producers, altering expectations and experiences, engaging with wider and non-academic audiences, and seeking new forms of political engagement (see Catalina Cortes Severino).

The authors collected here blur the classical division of such epistemological fields - in their materiality and process, experimentation and creativity -, placing themselves at the intersection between “art” and “ethnography” and expanding already existing categorical distinctions. Their multiple placement - integrating different modes of perception, acting and thinking - opens novel possibilities of connection with the informants, of emotional (verbal and non-verbal) exchange, of insights on the social context and its power dynamics, making this issue not only a fruitful example of interdisciplinarity but above all, of indisciplinarity. Far from representing a methodological deficiency, the concept of indisciplinarity expresses the difficulty and the refusal to adhere uncritically and orthodoxly to a single discipline. This is precisely because disciplines - such as identities and paradigms - appear as (historical and political) constructions, edified on differences and protected by the erection of walls, causing a depletion of their epistemological potential and a decrement of their versatility and energy.

Contemporary anthropology, in a “dialectic tension with the contemporary world in which it is embedded, redefines the scale, the conceptual foundations, and the techniques of knowledge production” (Comaroff 2010: 524), is always more characterized by fluid, eclectic and transforming fieldwork practices that expand, transcend, contest and transfigure historical disciplinary and conceptual boundaries, negotiating and creating

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8 new research spaces and opportunities. Advocating indisciplinarity not only as an invitation to transgress disciplinary borders, but also as a form to reflect on disciplinary limitations and to rethink the historical and social conditions of their own foundation and consolidation, and the methodological coordinates of anthropology, the essays in this volume open the path for alternative perspectives and for flexible and eclectic methods. Providing avenues for a “new undisciplined anthropology” (Comaroff 2010: 527), or better for a “critical in/discipline” (Comaroff 2010: 533), our aspiration is to open up new horizons for a more collaborative, experimental, explorative and politically engaged anthropology.

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13

Ethnographic Portrait-Painting Today: Opening Up the Process at

NYC’s American Natural History Museum

Zoe Bray

Abstract

This article contributes to today’s discussions on the collaboration between art and anthropology and the necessity for ethnographers working with art to expound on their methodological process. The article discusses the application of contemporary ethnographic practice on portrait-painting in the specific institutional setting of New York City’s American Natural History Museum (AMNH), as a way to reflect on the norms and politics of representational forms and relations between the ethnographer, the ‘informant’ and the public. It reflects specifically on a curatorial experiment in which I took part, invited by the collective Ethnographic Terminalia at the AMNH, within the framework of the annual Margaret Mead Film Festival. The experiment involved installing a pop-up painting studio in the main hall of AMNH where I, as both a social anthropologist and a realist artist, would paint the portraits of two anthropologists over the course of three days. The experiment was to publicly expose the process of depicting a live human-being on canvas and examine what it might involve in terms of doing visual ethnography. The location of the AMNH for this experiment is significant because of its historical status as an authoritative place for displaying human cultures and their natural environment since the late 19th _{century. This article talks about the experiment in light of}

current discussions in anthropology on the transformation of the discipline as a co-production of knowledge utilizing multimodal approaches.

Keywords

Portrait-Painting; Multimodal Ethnography; American Natural History Museum; Ethnographic Terminalia; Collaboration; Visual Representation; Curatorial Practice.

Biographical note

Zoe Bray is Visiting Scholar at the European Forum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to this she was Professor at the Center for Basque Studies of the University of Nevada Reno. She holds a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence, and an MA from Edinburgh University, Scotland. Bray is also an exhibited multimedia artist, working on the politics of identity. More info: www.zoebray.com. Email:

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12835/ve2018.1-0100

14

Introduction

Note-taking, participant observation, hanging out, going native, interviews, spontaneous conversations, photography and video-making, these are some of the ethnographic methods, tools, and approaches that anthropologists rely on today when out in ‘the field’. All the same, in this context, I have often felt stuck with the status of outsider with supposedly special knowledge and as ultimate decider on how to shed light on and represent the people I am researching on. I have frequently felt that, in my human encounters, relationships remained entrenched in social and political conventions, with the various hierarchies these imply. While this in itself is revealing and interesting for anthropology, it is also an obstacle, particularly pressing when we appreciate the discipline today as ethically engaged in a fair and egalitarian exchange of knowledge (Josephides 2015). Contemporary anthropologists are aware of the risks of the unequal power relationships between informants and researchers, and, over recent years, anthropology has made significant positive steps, re-thought as a discipline based on the striving for correspondence, and collaborative and intersubjective knowledge. Working with and through art has been one important way that some anthropologists have gone about tackling this new appreciation of the discipline, and numerous publications have appeared on the topic over recent years (Schneider and Wright 2010 and 2013). This article contributes to these discussions and the relevance of anthropologists working with art to reflect on their methodological process (Nielsen and Rapport 2017).

One of the practical ways that I have attempted to deal with my own challenges of effectively connecting with people in the field has been to use my skills as a realist portrait painter. Alongside my work as an anthropologist, I practice as an artist, specialising in portrait-painting from life. Aside from the different pleasures I get from artistic work, I enjoy specialising in the art of portrait-painting for the opportunity it gives me to delve into contemplation of and with another human being. As individuals, we have different preferences that fit with our personal characters, and I found that painting with someone else serves me well as a way to communicate. I came to discover that the painting sessions with the model offered a chance for both I and the model to engage in more relaxed social interaction, to be more ourselves in a way, where spontaneous thoughts and conversations with each other could take place; after a while, as the boundaries that come with expectation, role-playing and self-consciousness start to come down, the model and I can settle in to work together, undisturbed by outside influences and distractions, focusing on each other, I looking and painting the model, and the model looking back, posing, both of us involved in the portrait-making. We can give each other full attention, hang out together without the need to always talk, or to act a certain way with other people around. We can more easily just be and settle peacefully into our collaboration; there is room for silences and day-dreaming, and thus also for more fluid and reflexive dialogues.1

People nowadays tend to be accustomed to being photographed and filmed, but suggesting to paint them is an unusual proposal. Even despite today’s age of media-heightened ego vanity, such as with the trend of “selfies”, this intent scrutiny on the face can feel rather too self-conscious and invasive. It requires distinctly uncommon time to be

1 _{Portrait painting is just one way to obtain an exclusive face-to-face time with another person. It} certainly does not replace, but rather complements other ethnographic encounters. My selection of models is based simply on who I think would be willing and available to pose. This is the only criteria that excludes other individuals, just as there is always some sort of not-necessarily determined selection in any fieldwork situation, where the anthropologist gets to talk and be with certain people and not others.

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15 spent exclusively together, and unabashedly looking at each other for unconventional

amounts of time. The process of painting involves numerous sittings, usually over several days, sometimes weeks. Some people thus hesitate at first at my unusual proposal, but they then accept to pose, usually simply out of curiosity. Most often, the ‘informants’ I paint have no familiarity of portrait painting and of posing. Through many hours spent together, facing each other and observing each other, the model/’informant’ and I, the painter/anthropologist, experience each other’s moods and share conversations and silences in a more spontaneous way than we might otherwise. The models often say they have learnt a lot from being involved and witnessing the process of being depicted and represented. Some also mentioned how relaxing and soothing it was to simply sit there, “do ‘nothing’” and allow themselves to be considered. Drawing and painting are a slow media-commentary in our currently fast moving media world. They are also a slow channel, offering a gentle and unrushed way to reach out and connect (See also Berger 1953; Taussig 2009; Brew and Fava 2011; Causey 2012; Ingold 2013). As artist Molly Crabapple put it about her drawing practice, “It’s saying, ‘I cared, I did this, and you should

care too.’”2

1. Painting the portrait of Joan Arrizabalaga. Picture by Christian.

I find that portrait-painting allows me to engage further in one to one communication with an individual in the field in a literally extraordinary way. The painting quickly

2 _{http://time.com/collection-post/4518784/molly-crabapple-next-generation-leaders/ Last}

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16 becomes a common project, during which I can reveal my way of painting and the

model/informant helps me by holding the pose, and can witness and comment on the work. Despite my solid training in fine art, as an anthropologist, I remain critical of how I understand and translate onto the canvas what I see and feel. I voice my questions and doubts on my process to the model and invite her or his input. The model is thus witness to my uncertainty. The conventional unequal and hierarchical relationship between I, the anthropologist/painter/‘holder of knowledge and tools of representation’, and the model/Other/passive object of interpretation and representation is thereby shaken, and the portrait-painting process may develop more as a collaboration of sorts where the final picture incorporates stages of knowledge exchanged and developed between us (for more see Bray 2015a).

All the same, in the end, all the individuals I paint usually accept the result (some of course with more enthusiasm and conviction than others!), and it seems to me that they suppose that I, as the painter, can ultimately decide on the depiction, and that my choices must be based on valid reasons, or, at least, are legitimate due to my artistic license and academic authority. While it is undeniably nice to be attributed ultimate expertise, this gives me limited satisfaction as my research and painting involve constant self-probing and questioning. Yes, I have worked at length to develop my painting skills, have trained rigorously in artistic techniques and studied the disciplines of art history and anthropology, and thus can claim to a definite savoir-faire, but I remain aware of my human weaknesses and limits, even as someone possibly with something ‘deep’ and ‘unique’ to communicate to the world.

It felt necessary to me then to open up the portrait-painting process to a wider audience, encourage discussion among more participants, including not only the models but also general onlookers, and thus more explicitly reflect on and critique what is going on in the act of doing ethnography via painting. I have wanted to bring my painting out of the exclusive, private setting and into different public contexts, where I would be forced to further confront my privileged position of ethnographer/ anthropologist/painter - that is, the person conventionally associated with knowledge, skills and power to make decisive interpretations - and to experiment with the opportunity to get other people involved and have their say in the process.

There also arises the question of how viewers see and understand the final painting. We are today, especially, in an age where looking at a painting is a challenging exercise, given it has become so common for the majority of us people leading globally-interconnected lives to be subjected to innumerous images flashing before us.3 _{As such, it} has become increasingly uncommon to linger long in front of a painting, appreciating its subtleties and taking the time to explore its meanings behind the various layers of consciously and unconsciously applied paint.4 _{With limited acquaintance with the process} behind painting an image, many people also tend often to be somewhat prejudiced by what they think a painting is about, possibly considered something traditionalist and stuffy, elitist or one-dimensional.

In this vein, my questioning inscribes itself in the various “turns” that anthropology and ethnography have taken over recent years. Together with the “reflexive”, the “sensory” (Desjarlais 2003; Pink 2015), the “engaged” (Boyer no date), the “reciprocal” (Lawless 1992; 2000) and the “affective” (Stewart 2007) turns, dialogue with the arts has of late been given due attention in the new approach to the production of anthropological

3 _{https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-long-people-spend-art-museums Last accessed} November 14 2017.