Issue 3 - Experimental Folklore

EXPERIMENTAL FOLKLORE ISSUE THREE

ART/E/FACT

ISSN 2048-0946

FROM THE EDITORS Experimental Folklore was created in consultation with Vincent Moon, the French-born nomadic filmmaker famous for co-producing La Blogotheque’s Take Away Shows. As Moon’s cinematic interest turned to the ethnographic, we quickly noticed. Our first conversation took place the day he launched Petite Planetes,a nomadic label of films and music whose name is inspired by the work of Chris Marker. Over the past two years, Vincent’s work has developed into full ethnographic engagements with artists and communities spanning the globe, including his film series OKO - Carnets de Russie, Sonidos del Perú, and NOW ETHIOPIA, each composed of dozens of films, sound pieces and written statements.

Out of conversations and preparations for a screening at Quandrangle Film Festival came insights into Vincent’s practice and his staunchly antiinstitutional perspective towards filmmaking and community engagement. Vincent wrote to us: I guess I am now in a moment of my life where I can peacefully reconsider the notion of ego itself. The notion of ‘director’ is overstated and many things escape to our direction during the process of creation. It would have to be about letting it go as much as possible in the recording process, being open to the accident and play with it. In that configuration, the exchange with the ‘subjects’ is obviously on a very different level. I often show my ignorance of the result as a first contact with the people I will film. The result will clearly then be a ‘collaboration’ with all the impromptu in it. A collaboration born from the refusal of power.

It is this refusal of power that has motivated us as ethnographers to embrace unconventional folkloric practices, to emphasize the ways in which artists access cultural practices.

This access is one we would like to embrace and support with this issue of ART/E/FACT. Many artists have become forerunners in an ethnography of senses. Artists and ethnographers such as Maya Deren, Marcus Coates, and John Marshall explore folkloric practices through their respective mediums. More contemporary artists such as Vincent Moon and Jacob Kirkegaard, have a clear ethnographic perspective in their line of work, but are not afraid of misrepresenting the folklore or worried about staying within academic frames of anthropology - in this way they push the boundaries into an experimental folklore. We argue that this continuous stream of artists working in an ethnographic scope is a part of shaping the anthropological field, pushing the borders, and shaping a sensory ethnography, helping it re-define itself and it’s position within anthropology.

Accordingly, the works of the contributors to this issue all push the borders of folklore towards a more experimental approach. Angelika Böck’s “Track Me”, re-thinking Western conceptions of portraiture through an investigation of Aboriginal Australian hunters; Jonathan Hoskins’ “New Found Land”, an approach to the changing urban landscape in the wake of the London Olympics; Rosalind Fowler’s “The Folk In Her Machine”, a personal reflection on the process of fieldwork in the English countryside; Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard presents “Ears of The Other”, twelve audio post cards from Ethiopia; and visual artist Chiara Ambrosio’s journey to her ancestral hometown in “La Frequenzi Fantasma”.

In past issues we have been hesitant to define the boundaries of our themes, largely because our themes on dialogue and senses of place-making felt as new to us after their publication as the day the themes were formulated.

We theorise that Experimental Folklore is not a suggestion of particular artistic practices, or a framework for ethnographic inquiry. It is an ethos that each contributor has embraced: to develop a sense of tradition, place, culture and ritual through creative media praxes.

- Simone Cecilie Grytter & Ely Rosenblum

TABLE OF CONTENTS

01

TRACK ME A Portrait As Dialogue ANGELIKA BÖCK

07

NEW FOUND LAND

13

FOLK IN HER MACHINE

21

EARS OF THE OTHER

23

LA FREQUENZA FAN TASMA

The Heterogeneity of Place-making in London J O NAT H A N H O S K I N S

ROSALIND FOWLER

JACOB KIRKEGAARD

Hunting For The Ghost Frequency CHIARA AMBROSIO

01

TRACK ME A P ortrait as D ialogue

WORDS & IMAGES by

A n g elika B รถ ck

02

A s an artist, my interest is directed at forms of expressions, practices, rituals, or signs in various contexts aiming to set different contemporary modes of perception and representation of the individual – which I have come to regard as forms of portrayal – side by side. This has resulted in a series of “(self)portrayals,” for which I have applied a dialogical strategy by placing myself as the subject to be negotiated, studied and represented through interpretations by my fellow human beings and which has been at the core of my artistic practice for more than a decade. I call this artistic research and method “Portrait as Dialogue,” as it challenges and expands the parameters of the conceptions and conventions of “portraiture” by applying a new methodology based in primary socio-cultural fieldwork. The “Dialogical Portraits” are intended as a dual relation between both objectivities and subjectivities within the order of representation, and represent both a crossover and reversal of the traditional roles of the artist on one hand and model on the other.

The overarching aim of my activity is to re-think the Western conception of portraiture through the investigation of specific non-Western and subcultural modes that prioritise different codes and social processes of cultural production – modes that do not privilege the gaze in the production.

The research strategy draws on the practices of conceptual and socially engaged art, allied with the methodologies of anthropology. Material to the choice of the addressed communities is the significance of distinctive or traditional social and collective processes in the production, and meaning, of the cultural subject and object. A central strategy of the fieldwork is to prioritize the values of these processes through a strategic reversal, of the artist’s role as sole producer of images of the other, and the status of the anthropologist as privileged, detached observer. Instead, the artist/researcher enters into a communicative, dialogistic process with each community and its collective mode of cultural production, becoming the subject, or other, to be portrayed by the diverse and culturally distinctive approaches of each community. The goal is a novel, research-based, artistic approach and methodology enabling a genuinely new body of work, the “Dialogical Portraits.” These portraits are conceptually and formally premised on the new knowledge of differing representational systems gained from the interactive processes, investigative research and learning undertaken in single case studies. Indexical, non-depictive, and non-pictorial means of constructing representations, which displace the primacy of the gaze and, in particular, the privileging of one gaze over another, are foregrounded here. By critically revisiting and re-assessing how the representation of

individuals in such “other,” or non-Western, sub-cultures might be constructed, the artworks aim to develop a critique of Western perceptions of “portraiture,” and, therein, the constitution of identity and perception of self and others.

My research in and through art is inspired by and responds to the concepts of “faceless” portraiture, visible, for example, in the work of contemporary artists as Christian Boltanski, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, or Sophie Calle. Boltanski’s work shows accumulations of individual objects and photographs of different people that share a similar story, that create a collective memory. On the other hand, Feldmann’s compositions (especially his artist books) present typologies (e.g. of female body parts) or portray a single person by documenting all her clothes. In his “Dateline Pieces,” consisting of lists of Names and Dates, Torres positions the portrayed individual within a relevant social, cultural and political context.

Calle, using fictional and non-fictional narratives to create a new form of portrayal, is also a major influence on my work. In her work “Suite Vénitienne” (1979), for example, Calle pursued an incidental acquaintance from Paris to Venice while documenting her human target; for the complementary work, “The Shadow” (1981), Calle asked her mother to commission a detective to follow her one day through Paris – in order to acquire photographic proof of her existence.

My strategy draws on a video performance of the German artist Timm Ulrichs, and on a corresponding film editing technique. “Das getroffene Bild, das betroffene ich” (Ulrichs, 1980:57) is an artwork that responds to a newspaper report from 1973 about the putsch attempt in Chile. The reportage shows the photographer Leonardo Henriksen’s last picture (“Gewehr im Anschlag”): his murderer targeting his gun at him. In his performance, Ulrichs shoots with a gun into the lens of a running video camera. This performance strategy corresponds to the film editing technique “shot reverse shot” that features one character looking at another character (often off-screen), and then the other character looking back at the first character. Since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the viewer assumes that they are looking at each other.

The “Dialogical Portraits” are carried out according to the same pattern as Ulrichs’ video performance and “shot reverse shot”: With the help of a local facilitator, I identify my project participants and commission them to interpret me, to express how they perceive me by means of their specific cultural practice. The final installations, the results of my artistic research, consist of two parts: the products, recorded perceptions and assignments – in short, portraits – the co-producers have created of me (for the most part without knowing it), and the portraits I made of them.

The questions I pass, unspoken, on to those involved in my projects are always the same: How culture-specific are the ways in which we humans perceive ourselves and others? What is reality, what is fiction when we look at ourselves and others? To what extent do we project ourselves when we consider or represent our counterparts?

03

04

TRACK ME The Aboriginal Australians are excellent hunters. With their extraordinary skills in track-readings, old hunters are reported to be able to distinguish up to 200-300 single human footprints, as Robert Lawler informs us in his book Voices of the First Day (Lawler, 1993:186), and, if they are known to the hunter, to identify the individual that left the mark. Douglas Lockwood, an Australian newspaperman, who travelled widely through Northern Australia for more than 20 years, was amazed when he realised that his Pintupi interpreter was able to identify the person whose track they incidentally found in the desert (Lockwood, 1964:36). In the Aboriginal Australian’s culture – as in many indigenous societies – the representation of the individual never existed in the same way as Europeans understand the idea of the “portrait”. My interest in the Australian Aborigines’ faculty of track reading is centred on the hunters’ perception and interpretation of an individual – in my understanding, “portrayal” – based on the visible tracks that individual had left behind.

The four women I identify as contributors for ‘Track Me’ (2006/7) are all skilled hunters. I contacted them through Peter Bartlett (Japaljarri), a nonaboriginal Australian who fluently speaks Walpiri, the language of a group of now 5,000-6,000 indigenous Australians living in the Northern Territory north and west of Alice Springs. Peter, who has – due to personal experience and research – vast knowledge of Aboriginal Australian culture, has helped to conduct various research and documentaries on indigenous Australian issues. He acts as my facilitator and interviewer. Peter requests Mitjili, Ida, Judy and Noreen to follow and read a track I had imprinted by walking barefoot in the Central Australian desert the day prior. He pretends to have found the human traces incidentally during his walk while the participants and I picnic nearby.

Mitjili Napanangka Gibson was born and raised in the bush at Winparku (Mt. Webb), one of the last areas penetrated by Europeans, situated south of Lake Mackay and 600 km west of Great Sandy Desert. It was not until Mitjili was a mature woman who had already raised children in a traditional Aboriginal manner that she came into contact with white people in 1957. She moved out of the desert and lived in the government settlements Yuendumu, Balgo, and Nyimpi, around the Tanami Desert. Mitjili, who’s first language is Pintupi and who is fluently in Walpiri, was married according to the Aboriginal tradition, where one man could be married to up to three or more women. Mitjili’s excellent tracking skills were sought after by geologists and biologists. Mitjili, who passed away in 2010, was one of the senior Indigenous artists in Australia. She is the mother-in-law of Peter Bartlet, who acted as my facilitator and conductor of the experiment throughout this project.

Judy Nambajimba Granites was born and raised by traditional Aboriginal parents in the South Tanami Desert, an area that became one of the largest cattle stations in Central Australia. Judy is connected with a site called Wanapi, which is associated with the dreaming time Rainbow Serpent. She spent most of her life in the Yuendumu Aboriginal community carrying out work at the community hospital. During her life at Yuendumu she became an accomplished subsistence hunter and is recognised for having assisted in maintaining the intergenerational transfer of traditional environmental knowledge, including tracking skills. Judy, who is fluent in Walpiri

and understands several other Indigenous Central Australian languages like Anmagurri and Pintupi, is considered to be one of the principal holders of women’s ceremonial knowledge.

Ida Nungala Granites, who belongs to the Walpiri Group (north west of Yuendumu), was born and raised on the edge of Tanamu Desert at Yuendumu Aboriginal Community, 320 km north of Alice Springs where she has been employed as a health worker for many years. Ida had been taught tracking and the traditional subsistence hunting knowledge by her mother when she was a little girl. She fluently speaks Walpiri and is quite conversant in English. Ida has spent most of her life in a traditional marriage, as a co-wife, and is the daughter in law of Judy Nambajimba Granites, who she now looks after. Ida, who has raised several children and is a multiple grandmother living in an extended family, is still active in subsistence hunting in the land around Alice Springs.

Noreen Napajimba Robertson was born and raised in the South Tanami Desert and is connected to the dreaming time Mulgar Seed. Her parents lived a traditional lifestyle in an area of open grass, sand hills and few isolated rocky places called Janyinki. Noreen had been taught tracking skills by her mother and grandmother. Until her husband’s death she lived in a traditional arranged marriage and raised several children. During this period she was actively subsistence hunting. Most of her life she has resided at Yuendumu, where she had been employed for many years as a community shop worker and as a teacher’s aide at the community school. Being a widow with none of her own children still alive, she has now moved to Alice Springs where she raises five grandchildren. Noreen has found herself a range of small jobs: as an actor for the film business in roles of hunter and guide, and as an artist doing small iconography for the tourist market.

Mitjili, Ida, Judy and Noreen were asked to follow and read a track I laid out by walking barefoot in the Central Australian desert. The field interviewer, Peter Bartlet, challenged the respondents to say what they perceived through the traces while I portrayed them on video. Having given the correct time and day the track was made, they agreed that I must have been a stranger behaving oddly, unfamiliar with the area, who didn’t seem to follow a goal. A non-Aboriginal young woman who has not yet given birth. This turned out to be quite a correct description of myself walking around for no other reason than to leave my marks.

“Track Me,” consists of three videos showing different aspects of track reading: the interview, the process of reading my traces before interpreting them and a series of shots showing the women during hunting, and while drawing traces into the sand; these last videos were carried out individually with the interviewees during several other days.

All works of this series consists of two parts: the portraits the co-producers have created of me, and the portraits I made of them. As a constant throughout all works of this series, I have employed photography or video as the medium for these portraits, as the continuous use of the same technique highlights the respective technique that is investigated. This seemed important for me in regard to a presentation of the body of work as a whole. My “Portrait Partners,” for the most part, do not know to what extent they are involved in the project before it is concluded. My co-participants are commissioned and paid for their contribution.

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06

C onclusion I am carrying out research with people who have been historically overtly constructed as ‘other’ to my Western ‘self ’. My investigation, however, is not only restricted to the cultural or subaltern ‘other’. The representational practices of different sub-cultures and communities, such as psychological assessment, the evaluation of internet activity and customer behaviour, criminal phantom sketching, and the construction of avatar or look-alike identities, are also of interest. At this stage, however, I have primarily focused on indigenous practices as examples of different representational modes. My understanding of the cultural ‘other’ is rather used as a synonym for an ‘opponent’, while the concept of ‘contributor’ is used to describe the ‘counterpart’ whose insight and view of my ‘self ’ and the world around me is what I seek to gain.

My concepts and artistic products are not worked out in collaboration with my contributors. The participants are not informed about the research question or strategy, nor is my understanding of ‘portrayal’ explicitly stated. Material about my artistic work (such as photographs or texts) is usually not provided, and I do not attempt to articulate concepts of contemporary art that are relevant to my work. The respondents are commissioned and paid. They are informed that the results arising from their participation contribute to my art project and will be exhibited. Their contribution consists of their interpretations of me, which are audiorecorded, photographed or video-taped with their agreement, and their photo or video portraits taken by me. Sometimes they are informed afterwards about the artwork, its exhibition or publication. Our ‘dialogue’ thus becomes a practice which can be compared to ordering a hand-made, tailored suit, as opposed to a large-scale manufacturer who has total freedom to decide which design (style, cut, material, pattern and colours) one should wear. It is not an easy process. It requires of the individual a state of complete surrender; a forfeiting of the idea of the self, and the willingness to allow the ‘other’ to reinvigorate it with his/her own idea. My interest is in comparing the suit which is fabricated with its creator’s own appearance, outfit and background, in order to investigate how his decisions are linked to me, and to him as a culturally embedded individual. My costume designer is aware that his/her name and portrait, together with additional information concerning the tradition of dress-making which s/he applied, will be pinned to the suit s/he made for me. This is restricted to information on the location and year the attire was commissioned, the cultural belonging of the designer and the connected tradition of dress-making, the use of material as well as of the culturally defined meaning of the style and pattern selected. Contributors know that I define the product of this collaborative process as my artwork which is created with their (and other peoples’) help, and that it will be communicated as such. It is clear to the tailor that I want to wear the unique suit s/he made for me in public. It is obvious that I am not able to say where, on what occasions, in the presence of whom, or for how long I am going to display myself in the creation which s/he designed to suit me, as suggested and interpreted by my presence and request. A picture may later be sent to the tailor of myself wearing the garment at a particular event, as a gesture of appreciation.

My activity is intended as an archive of forms of human representation and an offer of a different view of “portrayal” – in a very wide, as well as a very

specific sense of the term. The installations try to bring across attitudes and transitions from the own to the other; to experience the concept of own and other. Through the presentation in the form of an artwork, the exhibition audience is given the opportunity to experience first-hand that the cultural practices of others, belonging to different concepts of identity, offer new ways for the individual to identify themselves, both within their specific cultural system, and through the eyes of others. The NorwegianAmerican novelist and essayists, Siri Hustvedt (2012: 111), expressed this process in terms of the art of writing: ‘I often see more clearly from somewhere else, as someone else. And in that imagined other, I sometimes find what I may have been hiding from myself.’

There is no question that I am an outsider, an unaffiliated roamer who finds herself in uncharted territory. I knew very little before my arrival at each site. I am fully conscious that my assessment and classification, in the scientific sense as well as in the eyes of my contributors, may be considered a misinterpretation. Being directed to me as much as towards the ‘contributor’ and ‘perceiver’ (the imagined viewer), my practice may rather be understood as an intense interest in experiencing our human potentials by ‘looking’ at myself through the ‘eyes of the other’, as expressed via multi-media art. This investigation of myself as an individual and a human being is a step towards obtaining possible answers, with the full awareness that the end of the road can never be reached. Anyway, art is not made to provide answers – it can only create a new, appropriate space in which the spectator may use the opportunity of the work to question and enlarge his or her own experiences by using all his or her senses for new cognitive possibilities. An artwork serves as a reflecting mirror, for the beholder as well as the artist, who is, like me, looking back onto her work to talk about it from a present perspective.

BIOGRAPHY Angelika Böck graduated in 1992 in interior design, and in 1998 in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Human perception and representation are the focal points of her work. Her practice is based, strategically, on dialogue and participation. Since 1999 she has carried out “Dialogical Portraits” in the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, the Finnmark region of Norway, Central Australia, Yemen, Malaysia and Mongolia. Angelika Böck lives and works in Munich, Germany and Bario, Sarawak/ Malaysia.

B ibliography Lawler, Robert. Am Anfang war der Traum. München: Droemer Knaur Verlag, 1993.

Lockwood, Douglas. The Lizard Eaters. Melbourne: Cassell and Company, 1964.

Siri Hustvedt (2012) Living, Thinking, Looking. London: Sceptre, New York: Henry Holt.

Ulrichs, Timm. Timm Ulrichs: Totalkunst. Lüdenscheid: Ausstellungskatalog Städtische Galerie Lüdenscheid, 1980.

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NEW FOUND LAND the H eterogeneity of P lace - M aking in L ondon

WORDS, IMAGES & VIDEO by

J onat h an Hoskins

08 “ A ll

things

have

a

home

but

one

–

T hou , oh E nglishman , hast none ! ”

T he excerpt is from the poem “The Masque of Anarchy,” written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819. It featured recently in Patrick Keiller’s 2010 film Robinson in Ruins, a film that came out around the same time that I began to feel that I no longer lived in London, but instead was coming to live in London2012 (Daniels et al., 2012). This sentiment instigated a visual art project that was realised in January 2013 as a gallery installation with a short video at its centre. The project came to incorporate disparate theories and practices from both visual art and anthropology. The purpose of the present article is to document moments in the development of the project when the two disciplines converged, a tendency which informed both the form and content of the work produced.

The project was motivated by an overriding concern for place in London at this historical moment, and how the power to place-make is presently distributed. ‘Place’ is intended in a very specific sense: the interest was not in how physical space is transformed, nor how media representations of it are culturally produced, but in how localities are experienced, and how such experiences are contested. This sense of place follows recent scholarship in anthropology and geography, and the work of Margaret Rodman in particular (1992). The term refers to a deeply embodied understanding of a social world, configured by both human and non-human practices and agencies, and only becoming explicit discursively. It is useful here because it overcomes both geographical and temporal distanciation in the task of understanding an individual’s experience of a social world. A place is ‘multilocal’ because it can incorporate various geographical localities at any moment, and it is ‘multivocal’ because it is constituted by the voices of multiple actors in a necessarily shared space of meaning. Past events and remote localities thus play a part in a place when agents bring them into its formation, either through discourse or practice (Rodman, 1992:641643, cf. Munn, 1990:1-2,14). Greater discursive authority or the capacity to reconfigure physical space is likely to afford a greater power of ‘placemaking’.

N avigating C onsensus Two events overturned any existing understanding of ‘place’ in London2012. Between 2008 and 2012, two and a half square kilometres of London were wholly reconfigured, physically and ecologically, both above and below ground level. After the heavy industry and railway works on the site were cleared, two million tonnes of soil were cleaned of remaining traces of “oil, petrol, tar, cyanide, arsenic and lead,” erasing all recent history of the site. The area was re-landscaped into wetland, wildflower, woodland and lawn areas, riverbanks, housing, and sports venues for the Olympic Games (GOC, 2012).

The second event was the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant, the procession of over 1,000 boats to mark the 60th year of the current monarch’s reign. It seemed that a rare occasion when resources are mobilised to bring London waterways centre stage in the popular consciousness was, markedly, also an occasion for reconstituting starkly dichotomised and symbolic power relations which, like the Olympic Park, precluded any ‘multivocality’.

The apparently unmitigated public acquiescence achieved by such events has led Jules Boykoff, a political scientist and former Olympic athlete, to fashion the term “Celebration Capitalism” to characterise the pattern of unprecedented socio-economic and juridical upheaval which accompanies their staged festivity, and which would be politically unfeasible at any other moment (Boykoff, 2012). As with Naomi Klein’s term “Disaster Capitalism” before it, “Celebration Capitalism” describes events that enable the opportunity to claim the state of exception, a key criterion of the sovereign, by Carl Schmitt’s definition (Boykoff, 2012).

The events bring to mind the European nation-state-building projects from around the turn of the twentieth century, which Eric Hobsbawm brought under the umbrella of “invented traditions”. For Hobsbawm, the “pageantry which surrounds British monarchy in its public ceremonial manifestations” typified such occasions (Hobsbawm, 1983). Boykoff ’s account might prompt recognition of quite different agents as sovereign, and such a perception of London2012 can be developed further by introducing Jacques Rancière’s related idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and the expanded conception of citizenship it incorporates. Together, they suggest an immediate causal relation between these mass-spectacle events and the capacity of citizens to contest and co-determine place in London2012: “A citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed. However, another form of distribution precedes this act of partaking in government: the distribution that determines who have a part in the community of citizens. The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed… There is thus an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics… [understood] as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise…” (Rancière 2007:12-13, italics in original) Rancière’s ideas have previously been related to the London Olympic Games by Mari Paz Balibrea, and her research agenda makes for a fair description of my own: an interest in “eruptions of dissensus against this consensual space… that challenge that cartography of the sensible and the thinkable” (Paz Balibrea, 2012).

My research was to take the form of fieldwork. It amounted to nothing that could properly be classed as ‘ethnographic’, and so the following is offered as ‘ethnography-lite’, at best. It remains of value however, because it led to encounters with counter-narratives to London2012 that dissuade such a singular characterisation of the Games as “a mega-event [which] regulates what is visible and invisible, sayable and unsayable, thinkable and unthinkable” (Paz Balibrea, 2012).

Both of the mass-spectacle events of London2012 concern sites which are historically of only limited ecological human determination, and which centre on waterways (the Olympic Park incorporates part of the River Lea and other canalised tributaries). For these reasons, the fieldwork came to centre on an urban ecology group, and on those living on canal boats in central London.

Throughout the second half of 2012, I accompanied volunteers of an urban ecology group in central London, particularly around the Lea Valley, on urban ecology walks and clean-up days. As an example of our geographical proximity to the Olympic park during these activities, one such excursion on the Lea ended when our canoes were turned back by military personnel at the perimeter of the site.

In the same period, I joined a narrow-boat resident on his frequent boat trips through central London, sometimes boat-sitting overnight when he was away. (The boat [resident] is officially deemed a ‘continuous cruiser’, and so must move between moorings every week or fortnight.) Aside from the experiential value of this, conversations were commonplace with other boaters, towpath users, and ‘bricks-and-mortar’ residents, who would often assume the boat was my permanent residence. To underscore the deep, insoluble contestations surrounding ‘place’ encountered I will offer two examples.

09

P lace P ersisting Informal conversations with urban ecology volunteers would often suggest narratives of place that subvert the reconfigurations of London2012.

One volunteering event took place on a riverbank just off the Greenway, a public footpath extending from Hackney Wick to Beckton, beyond East London. Comfortably into a conversation about the footpath, a volunteer explained to me with apparent pride that it only exists because it is simply the roof of the Northern Outfall Sewer, one of Joseph Bazalgette’s civil engineering projects of the mid-nineteenth century. As the Greenway bisects the Olympic Park, I was invited to consider that the centrepiece of London2012 “flows with rivers of shit”.

Another volunteer attested that it was initiatives of the same period which made our volunteer work necessary. This was a day of ‘Balsam Bashing’, the mass-removal from riverbanks of Himalayan (Indian) Balsam, one of the invasive species brought to London from British colonies in the nineteenth century for ornamental display. Balsam and several other plant species have become very successful invasive species and now dominate London waterways, to the detriment of native species.

Conversations such as this suggested that local residents’ place had not been reconfigured by London2012 to the extent that physical space had been. By these volunteers’ conceptions, the proximate locality remains indivisible (at least in this context) between the Beckton sewage works, a temporally distanciated, almost invisible, Victorian engineering project, and the spatially distanciated native environment of Himalayan Balsam.

Despite a mass spectacle of the most extreme proximity, a polysemic ecology arose, not only spatially and temporally, but economically also, since the volunteer day was partly funded by the Olympic Park Legacy Company, the organisation that inherited the Olympic Park after the Games (Thames21, 2012). This ecology incorporated Victorian civil engineering, an area of India, and the Olympic Park, all within the realm of the sensible.

The second example is a more general one, concerning narrow boaters’

status as residents on the London canal network. Innumerable conversations confirmed that political struggles with British Waterways (the public corporation responsible for the canal network at the time) have been ongoing for years. In March 2011 The Guardian newspaper ran a story with the headline “Houseboaters being ‘socially cleansed’ from Olympics area,” concerning hikes in mooring prices in London during the summer of 2012 (Griffiths, 2011). In 2012, The National Bargee Travellers Association submitted evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee of the House of Commons that British Waterways “carries out routine and systematic harassment, threats of homelessness and actual evictions directed against the adults and children who live on boats on its canals and rivers” (EFRA, 2012). British Waterways’ promotions of the canal network as an “open-air gym” would be presented to me as evidence to support the conviction that the organisation would prefer canals to be without continuous cruisers. A public consultation exercise by the organisation in 2011, following proposals to change mooring rules, elicited responses from boaters and other self-identified canal users in defence of the vibrant communities living along the towpath, expressing the fear of physical assault and even the conformity of modernity, as well as concerns for wildlife and “the heritage of our canals… of the travelling trades and cargo man”. In addition, no absolute consensus regarding the geographical delimitation of “London canals” is apparent from the responses: the Regents Canal, Hertford Union and Limehouse Cut are entirely and indisputably in London, but all effectively form a single, unbroken watercourse with the Grand Union Canal, which extends as far north as Birmingham (Kemp, 2011).

To frame the situation in the language of the wider project, such struggles centre on contestations of place. At issue is not simply what kind of spaces London canals are – and should be – socially or ecologically, but what they are intrinsically and extrinsically, which localities they include and exclude, the temporal range they encompass, and the relationship between human agencies and non-human agencies.

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D eferring A rbitration From the beginning of the project, I had an agreement with an arts institution to produce a gallery-based art work at the end of it for a monthlong display. This demand for ‘univocal’ cultural production from a process with an overriding concern for retaining multivocality seemed to conform to Charles Briggs’ characterisation of anthropologists required to textualise research into so-called “invented traditions” as “arbiters of cultural genuineness”, the consequence of “asserting…extensive rights to decontextualize highly politicised discourses and to recontextualize them in… far-reaching ways” (1996:460, 459). Hence, the overriding sentiment at this point of the project follows Briggs’ own, concerning his fieldwork with “individuals… attempting to make their voices heard in political, educational, cultural, economic, and other arenas… Questions regarding the legitimacy of the effects of these activities are actively debated in… communities, and I do not see it as either my duty or my right to use my own… voice in validating particular stances and undermining others.” (1996:448) The project was eventually realised as an installation comprising objects and a short video. A simple narrative structure underpins the entire work, an adaptation of the premise of Don Quixote. The Quixote character’s inner monologue comprises excerpts from literature, which has historically informed human relations with non-human ecology. This imagined relationship might be one of gendered dominion (Merchant, 1990:164-190, on Francis Bacon), or mimesis for the purpose of engendering beauty in the built environment (Gandy, 2006:65, on Vitruvius), the ‘background hum’ of our cultural dispositions to ‘nature’, perhaps.

There is some allusion to how this ‘background hum’ may have been instantiated historically in London, such as the building of the Regents Canal, in the nineteenth century, and the New River, in the seventeenth.

Nothing more contemporary is explicitly referenced. From the viewpoint of the Quixote character we see: post-industrial vistas of canal-side London; obstinate wildlife coming in and out of view; a Victorian gas holder; mid-twentieth-century tensegrity structure architecture; suburbia. The narrative continues on to the tidal river, and smooth panning sequences give way to unsteady camerawork. Therein lies the project’s attempted defence of multivocality against its own univocality: throughout, spaces are shown, but the final signification of place is the responsibility of the audience.

The impetus to realise the project in this way is best articulated (only partially retrospectively) with reference to reception theory, a body of work that shifts the analysis of cultural production from its products to their reception by an audience. It developed within literary theory in the late twentieth century (Holly, 2002:450) and has since made some limited impact on both anthropological and visual art theory (Martinez, 1992; Pink, 2007:100-103; Holly, 2002:448). The overriding subdivision in reception theory is between a greater or lesser historicisation of the reader. Within the former, the reader’s horizons of expectation – her distinct historical and social situatedness – determines how the work is interpreted. Within the latter, the reading of an idealised ‘implied reader’ is immanent to the work (Holly, 2002:449-452, Kemp, 1998:181-183, Selden and Widdowson, 1993:52-57).

Further invoking the language of reception theory, the intention in realising this project was to provoke the heterogeneity – the multivocality – of readers’ conceptions of place that were encountered during research. By intending ‘blanks’ throughout many sequences in the video, the reader is invited to draw on pre-existing interpretive models, and specifically those of place (Holly, 2002, Martinez, 1992, cf. Ruby, 1993). The only ‘implied reader’ is the one whose sense of place relates to the video’s content, so that each instance of the film being watched is also an instance of the project being completed, and an instance of place-making.

This isn’t an adequate use of reception theory as it stands. The installation remains in a white-cube gallery, in an arts institution in East London, with all the cultural politics that that encompasses. Such factors and innumerable others will impact on any reception of the work. Again though, the objective incompleteness of the work is hopefully of benefit. The video will presently be shown at a film evening organised by some London boaters, outside of a gallery context. Hopefully there will be many more such screenings. In labouring to add qualification to the unidirectional conclusions of Boykoff and Paz Balibrea here, I have all but omitted mention of the overwhelming support their arguments deserve relating to the impact on place of the events of London2012. If the project has been successful, then each screening event will be a further enactment of the counter-hegemonic place-making encountered throughout its research.

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B iography Jonathan Hoskins is a visual artist living in London. He holds undergraduate degrees in 3D Materials Practice and Politics, Philosophy and History and a postgraduate degree in Anthropology and Cultural Politics. He is currently an Associate Artist at Open School East.

Kemp, Damian. “River Lee Area Draft Mooring Management Plan: Public Consultation Summary.” British Waterways. Web. 2011. http://www.britishwaterways.co.uk/media/documents/consultations/Lee-consultationsummary.pdf

www.jonathanhoskins.com

Kemp, Wolfgang. “The Work of Art and its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception.” The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Cheetham, Mark A., Michael A. Holly and Keith Moxey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 180-196.

B ibliography Boykoff, Jules “Celebration capitalism: The London Olympics and its Discontents”. Backdoor Broadcasting Company. Web. 17 Jul. 2012. www. backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/07/jules-boykoff-celebration-capitalismthe-london-olympics-and-its-discontents Briggs, Charles. “The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the ‘Invention of Tradition’”. Cultural Anthropology 11.4 (1996): 435-469.

BW (British Waterways) “Consultations”. British Waterways. Web. 2011. www.britishwaterways.co.uk/consultations (Direct quotations from public responses 49, 129, 103 & 15, respectively).

EFRA (Environment, Food, Rural Affairs) Commmittee. “The Draft British Waterways Board (Transfer of Functions) Order 2012 and the Draft Inland Waterways Advisory Council (Abolition) Order 2012: Oral and Written evidence, Tuesday 13 March 2012”. United Kingdom Parliament.

Web. Mar. 13 2012. www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmenvfru/1890/1890i.pdf Gandy, Michael. “Urban nature and the ecological imaginary.” In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Ed. Heynen, N., M. Kaika, E. Swyngedouw. Routledge: New York, 2006: 63-74.

GOC (Government Olympic Communication) Newsroom. “Sustainability key facts.” Government Olympic Communication. Web. 7 Jul. 2012. www. goc2012.culture.gov.uk/background/sustainability-key-facts/ Griffiths, Ian. “Houseboaters being ‘socially cleansed’ from Olympics area.”

The Guardian. Web. 9 Mar. 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/ mar/09/houseboaters-socially-cleansed-olympics Hobsbawm, Eric. “Inventing traditions.” The Invention of Tradition. Ed. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence O. Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983: 1-14.

Daniels, Stephen, Patrick Keiller, Doreen Massey and Patrick Wright. “To Dispel a Great Malady: Robinson in Ruins, the Future of Landscape and the Moving Image,”. Tate Papers Issue 17. Web. 11 May 2012. http://www. tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/dispel-great-malady-robinson-ruins-future-landscape-and-moving

Martinez, Wilton. “Who Constructs Anthropological Knowledge? Toward a Theory of Ethnographic Film Spectatorship.” Film as Ethnography. Ed. Crawford, Peter Ian and David Turton. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992: 131-161.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revoution. London: Harper Collins, 1990.

Munn, Nancy. “Constructing Regional Worlds in Experience: Kula Exchange, Witchcraft and Gawan Local Events.” Man, New Series 25.1 (1990): 1-17.

Paz Balibrea, Mari. “The Militant City: About the Project.” The Militant City. Web. Jun. 17 2012. http://themilitantcity.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/ about-the-project/ Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage Publications, 2007.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2007.

Rodman, Margaret. “Empowering place: Multilocality and Multivocality.”

The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Ed. Low, Setha M. and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1992: 204-223.

Ruby, Jay. “The viewer viewed: The reception of ethnographic films,” in The Construction of the Viewer, Proceeding from NAFA 3. Ed. Crawford, Peter Ian and Sigurjon Baldur Hafsteinsson. Hojberg: Intervention Press, 1993: 193-206.

Selden, Raman and Peter Widdowson. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

Thames21 “Big Waterways Clean Up 2012 Partners.” Thames21. Web. 2012. http://www.thames21.org.uk/big-waterways-clean-up-2012-partners/

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FOLK IN HER MACHINE

WORDS, IMAGES & VIDEO by

R osalind F owler

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E ach year on the 1st of May in Padstow in Cornwall, the community gathers together to take part in the much anticipated annual ‘Obby ‘Oss tradition. This vibrant celebration of the arrival of summer centres around two black masked creatures resembling horses under which men wearing masks twirl and cavort their way around the town followed by drums and accordions. In mid-Winter, on the 6th of January in North Lincolnshire, another seasonal folk custom takes place called Haxey Hood, also a hugely significant day for the local community. This tradition is primarily a ritual game between men from the two competing villages of Haxey and Westwoodside, in which a leather baton is thrown up and fought over until it crosses the threshold of the winning pub.

Over the past four years, as part of my practice-based PhD research, I have repeatedly returned to these folk traditions with my camera to film the events and record the voices of locals who take part in the rituals. I am interested in how certain senses of place and belonging are imagined, performed and re-affirmed through these traditions when seen in the light of the broader socio-economic contexts in both localities. In Padstow, a huge proportion of second-home-owners and surging property prices have left Padstonians feeling disconnected from their town, and in Haxey what was once an agricultural area is now a quiet dormitory village, with many residents now commuting to Doncaster or Scunthorpe. Locals I met consistently talked about the traditions in the light of these and other factors, and in Padstow the tradition is often referred to as “the only thing we have left”.

The research investigates how film as a medium is capable of directly conveying phenomenological experience, might transmit the sensual qualities of lived experience, place and landscape to an audience. Drawing on Sobchack’s (1992) conception of the film as a body in itself, the role of embodied experience is central in exploring interconnections between the bodies of the filmmaker, the film itself, subjects, and audience, along with their empirical possibilities in documentary filmmaking.

But as is well documented, film does not simply present these ‘raw’ life experiences to an audience unaltered. In the process of filmmaking, reality is fragmented and transformed, both through gathering audio-visual materials ‘in the field’, and in the editing process. In my film, experimental ethnographic methods such as embodied camera techniques, autoethnography, and fictionalisation (following Russell, 1999) are used to investigate and highlight the ways that place and ritual might not only be known and understood, but also be performed, distorted and imagined anew through film.

Folk in Her Machine starts and ends in London, and is narrated by a female character living in the city reflecting back on the archive of footage she has collected over the years on her visits to observe the traditional customs. Her voice is interwoven with the voices of locals she meets, some of whom live in these places, and others who travel back each year to take part. These different perspectives form part of a wider reflection on place, belonging and ritual in a global world.

The film intends to draw close to subjects through intimate and tactile camerawork, mimesis, and movement. While my use of these techniques are not meant to be read exclusively in this way, they are influenced by discussions of Laura Marks (1998) and Jennifer Barker (2009) on ‘haptic’ cinema as a form of feminist visual strategy. As the narrator moves from place to place, so too the camera moves around, tracks out of train windows, and closely scrutinizes the landscape. During the rituals themselves, the hand-held camera follows the action closely as the narrator hopes to unravel and feel for herself the power of these moments. And yet as both female and non-local at these pre-dominantly male rituals, there are limits to her own experiences, and filming becomes largely an act of imagining.

These gaps in her experiences are played out and addressed in various ways, such as through camerawork, the narrator’s reflections, and re-filming techniques. In Haxey, for example, she cannot get into the ‘sway,’ the name given to the group of men huddled together pushing for their side in the game, to witness the experiences for herself, so instead uses footage shot by a local man with a hidden camera. Difference becomes clear too in Padstow, where locals fiercely defend the tradition from outsiders and she dare not get in too close. Once back in the studio, certain ritual sequences are then projected and re-filmed. Through these manipulations, alongside the use of hand-processed 16mm film and slow motion footage, attention is drawn to the surface of the image and the audience is reminded that what they are experiencing is not the rituals themselves, but a transformed version of reality.

The framing of the whole film through a fictional perspective closely based on my own experiences involves a distancing from any claims to authenticity, instead allowing for performative truths to emerge. Rather than the audience being passively immersed in the images as might be the danger of a phenomenological approach foregrounding multi-sensory experience, the work instead reflects on film’s interplay between “meaning and being” (MacDougall, 2006:4), both drawing close and pulling apart to explore place and ritual.

B iography Rosalind Fowler is an artist filmmaker with a background in film, cultural geography and visual anthropology. Folk in Her Machine (2013) was recently completed as part of an AHRC funded practice-based Phd at LCC. The film premiered at Place: Occupy, an annual cross arts event in Suffolk curated by Gareth Evans in February. It will screen at the William Morris gallery as part of a late night opening of Jeremy Deller’s Venice bienalle piece English Magic on 6th March and elsewhere in 2014. www.rosalindfowler.co.uk B ibliography Barker, Jennifer M. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience.

University of California Press: London and L.A., 2009.

MacDougall, David. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2006.

Marks, Laura. “Video Haptics and Erotics.” Screen 39.4 (2008): 331-348.

Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Duke University Press: Durham, 1999.

Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1992.

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EARS OF THE OTHER

WORDS & SOUNDS by

JACOB KIRKEGAARD

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Click the audio waveform to listen

E ARS OF THE OTHER consists of twelve sound pieces, each edited to last exactly one minute.

These twelve recordings were made in Ethiopia following interviews with twelve Ethiopians about their favourite sound from their everyday: They were asked to recall and describe a sound which they had often paid attention to, found characteristic or remarkable in one way or another. The sound was then recorded in collaboration with them. Like a kind of sonic postcard. The concept of a postcard is to tell a lot in a very short way, to offer an impression of a certain location to family or friends back home.

Here, this idea is interpreted in sound. Each track is left untitled for your imagination. For best listening experience headphones are recommended.

EDITOR’S NOTE We are proud to present Jacob Kirkegaard in this edition of ART/E/FACT. Kirkegaard operates within the world of sound art, exploring the world through listening - a sense that the field of sensory ethnography is becoming more attuned to.

While Kirkegaard has never deliberately worked within an anthropology of sound or placed his work in an ethnographic context, this audio-piece EARS OF THE OTHER attempts to understand the people around him through their ears, bringing Ethiopia to your listening space. Kirkegaard works from the perspective that the locals hear their country in a different manner than he does as a non-local: an other in Ethiopia. Through these twelve sound pieces, he shapes this local experience and the unique ways in which we know through sound. The connection to a sensory ethnography then seems obvious to the anthropological eye (or ear). We invite you, our readers and listeners, to close your eyes and explore Ethiopia through different ears.

BIOGRAPHY Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard’s works are focused on scientific and aesthetic aspects of sonic perception. He explores acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible to the immediate ear. Kirkegaard’s installations, compositions & photographs are created from within a variety of environments such as subterranean geyser vibrations, empty rooms in Chernobyl, a rotating TV tower, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself. Based in Berlin, Germany, Kirkegaard is a graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne. Since 1995, Kirkegaard has presented his works at galleries, museums, venues & conferences throughout the world. His music works are released by labels such as Touch, Posh Isolation & Important Records, and he is a member of the sound art collective freq_out.

You can listen to more of Kirkegaard’s universe at www.fonik.dk

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LA FREQUENZA FANTASMa HUNTING FOR THE GHOST FREQUENCY

WORDS & IMAGES by

CHIARA AMBROSIO

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L a Frequenza Fantasma (The Ghost Frequency) is a film that paints a nonhierarchical portrait of Verbicaro, a crumbling village nestled on the mountains of Calabria, in the south of Italy.

It is the story of a place suspended in time and space, a place of sounds, smells and numberless thresholds where the memory of a mythical past and the present are inextricably intertwined.

It is an investigation into the nature of collective and personal history, into the origin and preservation of memory: how it is etched and perpetrated, both in the minds of the people who still live there, and in that of the soil, the ruins, matter itself.

It is the story of the relationship between animate and inanimate matter, and of how this relationship turns into the motor and purpose of existence: a search for the sacred patterns of the quotidian within the rhythms of nature.

The film took five years to complete and was an incredible journey through physical and metaphysical environments in an attempt to find unity and continuity in my own personal history and, indirectly, in that of a whole town.

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Verbicaro has no direct tie with my family although it exists just 50 km away from my childhood home (in the south of Italy distances have a habit of swelling out of proportion, becoming philosophically insurmountable even when physically they might be). It was chance that brought me to the village for the first time shortly after the death of my grandparents, at a time when the trajectory that I had traced from my birth through various instances of growth and displacement appeared to me to fracture, threatened by the sudden loss of those whom, in my heart, held one of my extremities- my roots- firmly in place even as I wandered further away from them.

Following the words of a stranger in a cafĂŠ, who spoke to me about the village, I set off on a short drive from my home on the shores of a raging sea, up the mountain that rose from its side like a majestic shadow, along its narrow winding roads that reached out at impossible angles over rocks and ravines, visible arteries over its weathered, splintered skin.

It was evening on Easter Friday when I reached Verbicaro for the first time, and in the dying light of day the village shivered with hundreds of people that had gathered together to celebrate the Christ’s death and resurrection, their breaths and whispered prayers dramatically interwoven with the static hiss of the brightly tinted electric street-lamps.

I let myself be carried by that bustling tide, coursing through the silent village like dark blood: black-clad women sang their soft lament in tentative unison, the band played mournfully and hopelessly out of tune, old men with eyes red from tears crossed themselves as small children in white tunics whipped themselves with chains, all of them looking on solemnly as the statue of the Madonna made its solitary journey through the silent streets to meet her dead son.

The Easter play unraveled through the night following a well-rehearsed dramaturgy and fueled by a passionate fervour that possessed every brick, plant and heart.

And then, suddenly, like a broken spell, everything was over: the crowd dissipated as quickly as smoke, and all sounds vanished. I suddenly found myself standing in the middle of a completely empty village, still bathed in the otherworldly glow oozing from the street lamps, their electric hum now the only sound that penetrated the stunned silence. I wandered through the village once again, this time alone, noticing how as I cut into its heart along a myriad winding and shrinking paths, the illuminated windows were slowly replaced by black gaping holes, the village transforming imperceptibly into a strange world of ruins and mangled staircases, like the view through a cracked mirror. I encountered the other Verbicaro, made of stone and weeds. Its abandoned instances of existence- the damp postcards penned a century before inside jammed and splintered drawers, the stopped clocks on peeling walls, the collapsed roofs, the piles of clothes out of fashion for decades- and the ruffled stray animals that are at present its sole inhabitants.

Verbicaro revealed itself to me as a place of complex duality: on the outside a living and functioning town with a shrinking but healthy population, concealing within itself an abandoned heart of stone, a temple to another time, a different life, lapsed but not forgotten, overlooking the valley with a silent, compassionate and all-encompassing gaze. It appeared to me as a perfect stage on which to play out the complex and often irreconcilable dynamic between the present and the past, the real and the imaginarythat which is at the crucial heart of my artistic research.

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“Who do you belong to?”

This was the first question often addressed to me as I made my way through the streets of the village. A request to identify my origins and insert myself within a linear story that might somehow connect me to the village itself. I carried my grandfather’s surname as a flag, waving it along inhabited and deserted streets, for all to see, both the living and the dead.

Although he was born in a different village, the familiar ring to his name granted me and my camera passage and shelter, and allowed me to partake of moments of intimacy reserved exclusively for those who belong.

My grandfather was a doctor, and as was often the case in the south of Italy, used to travel along the coast to cure those who could not stray far from their inaccessible homes. I soon discovered that, far from being a stranger, my grandfather had healed many of Verbicaro’s broken bones, and was therefore guarded safely in the collective memory of the place.

The coincidence that had brought me to the village creaked open to let a little more light in.

At first I spent many hours talking to people, trying to glean from them what home might mean, why they had decided to leave, what had brought them back and why (most of the people there share a history of emigration that almost always culminates in a return home, sooner or later), what their relationship was to the empty shell of the abandoned village that oversees their daily life like a silent God. Above all I searched for a code to decipher the secret that cemented in them that which I craved, a placid and unquestionable sense of belonging.

They mostly stared at me bewildered by my simple and obvious questions.

As I hunted eagerly for quasi-mystical revelations, they offered deeply humane and well-adjusted examples of natural wisdom watered by endless streams of strong red wine.

“Signorina, man is made of body and of soul, and while the body is free to wander far, the soul is like an elastic, one extremity of which is rooted in its birthplace: so you can pull and pull and pull, but as soon as you let go the soul will spring back home” said to me Antonio, smoking strong unfiltered cigarettes that stained his cracked, tanned fingers a darker shade of brown.

He led me along the uneven cobbled paths of the abandoned village to a rickety staircase entirely overgrown with weeds: “This is my home, the place where I was born!” he declared solemnly as he struggled to push the broken door open on its rusty hinges. Inside a small room still guarded the sacred relics of his childhood: a football newspaper scrap pinned to the moist blue wall, furniture and a few bits of clothing. Antonio, now in his fifties, had left this home like many of the other villagers when he was a child to move to the new village, just a short walk away.

He had never returned until now.

As we prepared to leave, Antonio’s eyes welled up as he ran towards a minute old lady that appeared suddenly in the street like a tiny ghost. They hugged and kissed each other through the tears. The woman was Antonio’s aunt, whom he hadn’t seen in years. She is one of a handful of people that remain rooted in the abandoned village, and since he lives in the new village an impassible gulf stands between them.

Antonio’s aunt is, like the others whose testimonies I gathered in my film as they crossed my path in the abandoned village, a guardian, and her existence is itself an intervention: her stories and actions have the power of an incantation, that grants survival and continuation to what would otherwise crumble into oblivion and loss.

The physical presence of the body and the overwhelming power of a wild and untamed nature are the two forces that dominate all belief in this secluded and anachronistic stretch of land, where faith and superstition are the binding elements that help the continuation of identity and collective history.

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With time, as I returned to the village year after year, I watched the day transform into night over its stooping figure, I watched it age and break at times, I listened to its voice and its silences, I followed its gaze as it rolled down the valley.

engaging with time as physical matter through a careful and protracted period of observation, framed through the lens of an animator’s eye, trying to allow for minute transformations to occur and unlock all kind of quiet epiphanies.

I walked through its streets thinking about distance, layers, sediment: of how the same reality exists at once as something entirely different, how personal narratives are woven into the material fabric of a place and made flesh, contributing to a dynamic collective history, invented and materialized by countless pairs of hands, before they too are returned to dust.

“La Frequenza Fantasma� is an attempt to uncover all the layers of historical sediment that had accumulated in that particular space through time, while reaping my own new myths through a personal interpretation and direct encounter with place and narrative. Sound and music played a crucial role in the process, guiding and displacing the eye, allowing both the viewer to engage with the manifold layers of interpretation of the real, erasing and magnifying tones and nuances, building up to a lyrical portrait of place at once objective and profoundly subjective, almost subliminal, aiding the process of making visible the invisible.

I became aware of traces, both the visible and the invisible ones: I noticed how the abandoned village carried, etched on its skin, the numberless stories of the people that had passed through it, and whose presence, memories and gestures still reverberated within it like sounds inside the resonating chamber of an instrument.

The village appeared to me as a receptacle that could be carefully prized open to learn from it about the inner machinations of man, of history and the human need to tell stories and plant them in fertile soil to grant them continuation through space and time.

It also struck me as a place in which I could explore the poetics of the real and the very blurred line that separates it from the wild stirrings of the imagination, and the enchanted intersections between the two, so apparent to me in the abandoned village that existed somewhere in the charmed glow of the in between.

As an artist working primarily with film and photography and their intrinsic fabric- light and time- I am perpetually involved in the act of looking,

The film attempts to break down the experience of looking into its active ingredients, using it as an instrument through which to tune into frequencies that, although invisible to the eye, are nevertheless a fundamental aspect of our collective subconscious, and continue to haunt the ether just like sound waves that once released can never fully disperse.

Making this film became a way for me to engage, through the process of looking, with the social and political complexities of a village in the throes of change, to give voice to its inhabitants and their stories in the face of oblivion and decay, and to explore the effect that time has on both place, spirit and matter.

Verbicaro became an archetypal home, and my film an attempt to unravel the mysterious stirrings of the soul that at once bind us and push us away from it.

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EPILOGUE: PASSING THROUGH (on arriving to Verbicaro for the first time) She looked outside the window of the bus as it slowly crawled up the steep mountains like an unsteady spider laden with the weight of captured prey.

Another sharp curve, and the village appeared, a crumbling temple balancing precariously on uneven cliffs.

She studied its familiar outline against the sky and placed it in the memory she had prepared especially for it in her mind.

The soporific sun of that summer afternoon burnt her eyes as the bus crawled to a halt. Two old ladies preceded her onto the melting tarmac and disappeared quickly from her view.

The empty streets were deaf with silence, blinded by a light so bright it seemed almost to erase them. She walked, invisible, amongst the self-effacing walls. Muffled voices crept out of the cracks, the sound of lunch on the table, the sound of home hanging in the heat above her like a ghost.

The open windows of the abandoned houses gazed at her like unwilling spectators of her solitary reverie, with no wisdom and no memory to share.

Her own memories fit uneasily despite a remarkable similarity between their fabric and that of this place.

The decaying buildings welcomed her home, a complete stranger.

She feigned a familiarity she did not possess, tripping clumsily on the uneven cobbled roads.

“I have just returned to the village after thirty years abroad”, timidly whispered to her the young man, in between feeding coins to the slot-machine inside the bar. “I am very ill, and I wanted to die in my home”, he said, “that is why I have returned. But my family refuses to see me, they are ashamed, you understand, so I live in the old people’s home, just there, see? Where that big door is. And I receive an allowance.”

man used to walk, screaming, through the narrow streets and sell us whatever we needed. And all was full of love, love everywhere.” His eyes stare vacantly for a few instants, then he feeds more coins to the machine.

“Now the village is abandoned, nobody goes there anymore. But I like to walk there at night, when I cannot sleep.”

The coins drop with a jangling sound that reminds her of the passing of time.

After the last coin vanishes into the metallic abyss, the man gets up with his peculiar grace, waves goodbye with his hand to the young man behind the bar, and wades out into the mid-afternoon heat, falling casually on a bench next to his octogenarian friends, teasing them affectionately, stealing a rusty smile from their furrowed brows. He closes his eyes and smiles, welcoming the soft heat of the sun caressing his face.

BIOGRAPHY Chiara Ambrosio (b. Rome 1980) is a London-based filmmaker and visual artist, working with animation, experimental film, documentary and sound to explore the ways in which we perceive, remember, articulate and preserve personal and collective histories and place through the filter of memory and the imagination.

Her work stems from an interest in the moving image as a tool through which to experiment with the boundaries of time and space, both conceptually and physically, re-enchanting the experience and perception of reality through an encounter between the poetics of the real and the erratic and subversive language of dream and the imagination.

He feeds more coins to the machine.

Her work includes collaborations with groundbreaking performance artists (Dominic Johnson, Helena Hunter), composers (Michael Nyman, Matti Bye), musicians (Amanda Palmer), and has been shown in a number of venues including national and international film festivals (Cambridge, Tehran, Leeds, Montreal, Budapest, NYC, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Winnipeg, Berlin, LA), galleries (Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, Southbank Centre, Millennium Film, The Horse Hospital) and site-specific events.

“But I remember when I was a young boy, just before I left home to go and find work. I lived with my grandmother, in the old village; the rag’n’bone

Chiara is also the founder and curator of The Light & Shadow Salon, a monthly film Salon at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)