The Future of Visual Anthropology
Visual Presentations | Anthropology Day 2019 |
This session will look at the future of Visual Anthropology in the Netherlands. In a disciplinary sense, looking at different and innovative ways of doing Visual Anthropology and at future developments and possibilities, and in a more personal sense, giving the floor to the recently graduated new generation of makers and scientists that constitutes the future of Visual Anthropology.
Shirley van der Maarel’s Belonging in Italy’s depopulating villages, from a refugee perspective takes the case of Valle di Comino (Italy) to explore how refugees create a sense of belonging in rural depopulated areas. In a collaborative project with refugees and residents, Shirley has created a visual guide that helps Italians to understand how their new neighbours go about their daily lives. This is accompanied by a film and a text that together provide a multi-sensorial understanding of belonging in Valle di Comino, from a refugee perspective.
Anne Vera Veen’s Activating the archive: a visual repatriation of the Berend Hoff photographic collection to the indigenous Kari’na takes as starting point the photographic collection of the archive of the Museum of World Cultures. Anne Vera Veen visually repatriated a photographic collection that was made by the linguist Berend Hoff, to the indigenous Kari’na village Corneliskondre in Suriname where they were made more than 70 years ago. Through photo-elicitation interviews with the (descendants of) the people who are depicted, she explored how these photographs can be activated to support alternative historical narratives and imagine decolonial futures. This resulted in the collaborative creation of a photographic museum in Corneliskondre. In addition to a written text, she presents this research in an exhibition that combines artistic interventions in the archival photographs with new media installations which invite the visitors to see, hear, and feel multiple perspectives on the pasts and the futures that are inscribed in these photographs.
Sophie Kalker attended the Visual Anthropology programs at the University of Amsterdam and Goldsmith’s College in London. She focused mostly on embodiment, healing and creative arts. For her Masters, she made a film about a social circus in South Africa.
Moderator: Mark R. Westmoreland (Associate Professor of Visual Anthropology, Leiden University)
Organizer: Eddy Appels (ABv/ Dutch Foundation for Visual Anthropology -SAVAN/Cineblend)