Performance, art, and anthropology

Performance, art, and anthropology Paul Ardenne, Miquel Barceló, and Josef Nadj, Paso Doble, presentation A performance with four hands (Festival of Avignon, 2006), Paso Doble brings together two artists - Miquel Barceló, a painter and sculptor, and Josef Nadj, a choreographer and dancer - in the creative process as they reshape a wall of wet clay For forty minutes, the two protagonists create a sculpture before our eyes, modelling and manipulating the soft clay until they become one with it Fruit of the imagination of these two exceptional ‘mud men,’ this surprising ballet relates to art, ritual, pagan and sacral trance, and even gymnastics Paul Ardenne will examine this creative collaboration in light of how artists and non-artists work with the body He will also explore the soft matter of clay as it evokes primitive body decoration, ritual coverings, and performance art that uses earth as its principal medium, such as the now-famous Challenge to the Mud by Kazuo Shiraga, an artist affiliated with the Gutai movement in 1950s Japan A professor (Faculté des Arts, Amiens) and regular contributor to the magazines Art press and Archistorm, among others, Paul Ardenne is the author of several works dealing with contemporary aesthetics: Art, l’âge contemporain (1997), L’Art dans son moment politique (2000), L’Image Corps (2001), Un Art contextuel (2002), Portraiturés (2003), as well as diverse monographs on architects, an essay on contemporary urbanity entitled Terre habitée (2005), and two novels Other publications include: Extrême - Esthétiques de la limite dépassée (2006), ImagesMonde De l’événement au documentaire (with Régis Durand, 2007), Working Men: Art contemporain et travail (with Barbara Polla, 2008), and À Flux tendu: La création plastique au tournant du 21ème siècle (2009) Miquel Barceló, Paso Doble For the 60th edition of the Festival of Avignon, Miquel Barceló collaborated with Josef Nadj, creating Paso Doble, a theatre piece combining his artistic universe with the other’s choreographic world Beginning with this creation, the artist will speak about his work and its relationship to performance art Spanish artist Miquel Barceló is one of the world’s most prominent contemporary artists His work encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and performance In addition, he recently completed an intervention at ONU (Palais des Nations, the United Nations in Geneva), working on a domed area measuring 1,500 square meters on the immense, vaulted ceiling of the conference room now known as the “Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room.” For the past few years, Miquel Barceló has been living and working in Majorca, Paris, and Mali Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Hell-Roaring Creek and Into-the-Jug: An Artist's Talk Lucien Castaing-Taylor will screen two of his recent films that deal with temporality and explore their relationship to art and anthropology These two works are part of a more extensive project, an ode to the American west - a sensory evocation of the lives of the last shepherds to guide their herds up the Bear Tooth Mountains in Montana toward the pastures for the summer Uncompromising and stripped of any voiceover, his project reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, landscapes and climates, vulnerability and violence are brought together intimately A filmmaker, artist, and anthropologist, Lucien Castaing-Taylor recently completed eight video installations that use different stylistic registers to evoke at once the attractions and the ambivalence of the pastoral by juxtaposing monumental and mythological landscapes of the American West with multiple tracks of subjective synchronous sound Casting-Taylor’s written publications include Visualizing Theory (ed., Rutledge, 1994), Cross-Cultural Filmmaking (with Bar bash, University of California Press, 1997), Transcultural Cinema, a collection of essays by the ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall (ed., Princeton University Press, 1998), and The Cinema of Robert Gardner (co-edition with Barbash-Berg, 2008) He was the founding editor of the American Anthropological Association’s journal Visual Anthropology Review (1991–94) Lucien Casting-Taylor is Director of the Film Study Centre and of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University Francesco Careri and Lorenzo Romito (Università di Roma TRE - Stalker / Osservatorio Nomade), Closing the “Campi Nomadi” in Italy and Europe Since 2007, Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade, a network of artists and researchers, in collaboration with the Urban Studies department at the Università di Roma TRE, has undertaken a research project on Romani communities in Rome through field investigations, university courses, and civic art actions Romanis are regarded, more than any other community, as ‘the Other,’ and make up the largest homeless, stateless population in Europe (approximately 15 million people) They are severely discriminated against in Italy through the “Campi Nomadi,” now referred to as “solidarity villages” - police-patrolled, segregated areas to which the Romanis are confined and in which their legal rights are suspended This study, entitled “Nomadism and the City: Living on the Edge; Nomad Camps and Temporary Shelters Seen Through Practices and Experiments in Public Art,” began with an exploratory walk along the banks of the river, where participants encountered more than fifty shantytowns (Sui letti del fiume, 2007) It continued with a travelling, international seminar in the form of nine camping cars visiting various habitats These habitats included temporary settlements from past generations, with containers, barbed wire and 24-hour surveillance cameras; authorized sites that have developed spontaneously; abusive shantytowns (Campus Rom, 2008); and, finally, an experimental project integrating several ethnic communities on an open building site at the Campo Rom Casilino 900, a building cooperative that worked to erect an actual wooden house (Savorengo Ker – the house for everyone, 2008), which burned down in December 2008 Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade started working in Rome in the mid-1990s, as anurban art laboratory made up of artists and architects Its first urban actionswere walks through “actual territories,” territories around the city's marginsand forgotten spaces that they refer to as the “unconscious becoming of urbansystems.” Since 1999, Stalker has been working on creating larger networks inpockets of cities where inhabitants of these “actual territories” reside In 2002, the collective took on the name of Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade,transforming itself into more extensive networks of multidisciplinary researchers working on the transformation of territorities (www.osservatorionomade.net) Catherine-Choron Baix, Shirin Neshat, Laos Courtship This presentation has a double perspective: anthropological studies of an ancient oral tradition, and the artist’s interpretations of this tradition In October 2008, in Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos, the artist Shirin Neshat shot films of courtship in Laos, which manifest themselves as love songs by men and women responding to one another in improvised duets These songs are rooted in ancient Lao betrothal rituals and are now quite rare Her films will be screened for the first time in Paris, and discussed in terms of anthropological perspectives as well as the artist’s intentions Catherine Choron-Baix is an anthropologist at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie urbaine at the CNRS After obtaining her Ph.D at EHESS in Paris, she received her Habilitation Degree at Paris VI University Her research is devoted to the Lao Diaspora in France, principally to social change in Lao communities abroad and in Lao PDR Currently, she is particularly interested in creative practices Among her publications are: Le choc des mondes Les amateurs de boxe thaïlandaise en France (Paris, 1995 Ed Kimé, Collection “Anthropologies”), “La danse, objet patrimonial A propos des Lao de France,” in Recherches nouvelles sur le Laos, Etudes thématiques 18, Yves Goudineau and Michel Lorillard (eds.) (EFEO, Paris, Vientiane, 2008, pp 385 – 402), “Art and virtue Gold thread embroidery in ancient court of Luang Prabang,” in The Last Century of Lao Royalty: A Documentary History, Grant Evans (ed.), (Chiang Mai, 2009, Silkworm Books: 303-314) She directed Mémoire d’or, mémoire de soie, a 51-minute digital film co-produced by CNRS Images Media/CNRS-LAU Craigie Horsfield, The Translation of Souls This presentation will present observations on separation, relations, questions of telling, and the artist and anthropologist as protagonist, along with notes on conceptions of the performative The context and practice of so-called "social projects" will also be discussed Particular attention will be given to practical questions; examples include references to the Canary Island of El Hierro, and to Nola in Campania The overview concludes with the outline of a proposal concerning ritual, and a summary of the actual and potential engagements of those making art, including the audience Since 1988, the date of his first exhibition, Craigie Horsfield has been an essential actor in the contemporary art scene, in which he proposes a new approach to photography For more than thirty years, he has advocated introducing sound work into museums, as well as the potential of multi-screen projections as social space and the central role of the public in relation to works of art For this artist, "The making of an artwork, be it the development, the viewing, or the affect, happens in the space between us, and thus unfolds in a relational present." The artist uses photography as a means of approaching the separation between being and representation He uses film, photography, sound work, printmaking, and drawing to question art and life, the familiar and the extraordinary, the epic and the banal, and the "slow time" of the present, which contains the traces of the past and also initiates the time to come Kjersti Larsen, Ritual, Performance and Bodily Transformation The paper explores performance and the analysis of bodily transformations during rituals in which the participants become both disassociated from and re-associated with different dimensions of their identity Ethnographically, the focus is on certain rituals performed in Zanzibar called ngoma ya sheitani During the rituals, spirits embody human beings in order to materialize and act in the ‘human world.’ In general, the difference between humans and spirits is one of excess rather than reversal As such, parody – not in terms of satire but rather as repetition with critical distance – seems to play an important part in bodily transformations in the context of ngoma ya sheitani In the process of transformation, participants are engaged in the interactional creation of what can be called a ‘performance reality,’ which, simultaneously, is and is not a state outside time This implies that meanings are generated in social space through performance and that performance is a fundamental dimension of any culture and important in the production of knowledge about culture Through performance, people both enact and extend their knowledge about difference and sameness, about who they are or are not, and about various others An important aspect of knowledge representation, the author will argue, is that ritual and performance give the participants a possibility to experience reality, in the sense that participants and audience reflect on other contexts of meaning in the performance setting, as well as in the social and cultural world from which ritual emerges As such, performances form part of the language of aesthetics Kjersti Larsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology in the Department of Ethnography, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo She has carried out research in Zanzibar since 1984 and since 1997 has conducted fieldwork in Northern Sudan Her main research interests are identity, gender and notions of difference, ritual, performance and society, religion, modernity and multiculturalism, and migration and mobility She is the author of Where Humans and Spirits Meet: The Politics of Rituals and Identified Spirits in Zanzibar (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), and editor of the forthcoming volume Knowledge, Renewal and Religion: Repositioning and changing ideological and material circumstances among the Swahili on the EastAfrican Coast (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2009) George Marcus, Further Inspirations from Theatre and Conceptual Art in the Refunctioning of Ethnography In recent years, the author has extended his concerns with the remaking of classic anthropological expectations and practices of ethnography through a series of discussions and collaborations (as reflected in the short books Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters, by David Westbrook, 2008, and Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, 2008, and in projects of the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine at http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ethnog/) that concern ‘design studio thinking’ for producing ethnography, and what he calls 'parasite' experiments emerging in the heart of fieldwork today This work depends on rethinking the imaginaries for 'scenes of encounter' and what is transacted in ethnographic fieldwork These imaginaries have been richly reconceived in standard ethnographic writing, transformed by the license, even requirement, since the 1980s, to be 'reflexive.' The subjects and objects of recent ethnography have caught up with, and challenged, reflexive thinking such that the very project of innovative ethnography is shifting toward what is labelled (at least in U.S anthropology) as 'activist' or 'public,' rather than being merely critical The author has found the ethnographic kinds of inquiry or consideration embedded in the productions of theatre and certain projects of conceptual/performance art to be inspirational in conceiving of a ‘refunctioned’ anthropological ethnography While anthropology is unlikely to recognize its own poetics more, or in a different form than it traditionally has, its commitment to 'activist’ and 'public' purposes connects it both pragmatically and in terms of craft to certain projects of theatre and art Georges Marcus wants to use his talk to continue to draw and encourage these connections George Marcus contributed to the creation of a critique on anthropology in the 1980s, which led to the publication of what is now called “Writing Culture” (Clifford et Marcus 1986) His projects are explicitly collaborative He participates in the systematic rearticulation and, in some sense, reinvention, of the norms and forms of the classic modality of research in social/cultural anthropology: fieldwork with the writing of ethnography as outcome He is interested in how the marginal, incomplete, and belated specialty of the cultural/ethnographic study of elites in anthropology (subsuming the early projects of his career, in Tonga, on capitalist dynasties etc.) has become the means of pursuing an anthropology of contemporary change in most topical arenas It is the necessity of working with experts and counterparts of various kinds as an orientation to fieldwork along with an abiding interest in the conditions of ordinary, often subaltern life that generates the complexities of multi-sited research about which he has written In recent collaborations, he has pursued this interest in inquiries involving Portuguese nobles, European politicians, Latin American artists, U.S bankers, and Brazilian intellectuals His written work includes The Late Editions series of annuals, 1993-2000, University of Chicago Press; Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth Century America, Westview Press (1992); Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Movement in the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 1986, with M Fischer), Writing Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1986, with J Clifford), and Elites: Ethnographic Issue (University of New Mexico Press, 1983) Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, Kongo Atlantic Body Language This lecture will focus on the agency of body language, gesture, and performance as cultural entities motivating responses and interpretations of cultural principles in the Kongo, in the Atlantic world Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz will argue that many kinds of body language can be seamlessly integrated into visual and aural communicative techniques, which he refers to as graphic writing systems Such systems also include proverbs, mambos, syncopated rhythms, a large variety of written symbols and oral traditions that are incredibly rich sources of cultural and social histories, religious beliefs, myths, and other expressions of the shared Bakongo worldview The presentation will incorporate key examples gathered through fieldwork among the Kongo people in northern Angola and the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as within Kongo-based religious traditions in the Caribbean and North America The lecture will explore fundamental questions of cognition, memory, and identity from the vantage point of multicultural studies, visual culture, art history, and anthropology ORLAN, From Self-Hybridization to biotechnologies ORLAN’s artistic journey has led her to touch on several of the topics most often examined in anthropology From her work on hagiography (‘Saint ORLAN’) and on self-hybridization (Pre-Colombian, African…), as well as with her work on the hybridization of stem cells, her oeuvre shows to what extent she thinks about and dialogues - or disagrees - with the cultures that inspire her Since 1964, ORLAN has worked in a variety of mediums: painting, sculpture, poetry, dance, theatre, and performance In her early photographic works, she conceived of her own body as a sculpture Soon, her work became the subject of public debate, with the artist at times making provocative performances in highly prestigious institutions Exploring multiple ways of working, using all types of supports from performance to video, photography to installation, ORLAN has generated a complex body of work that articulates recurrent themes: problems regarding the body and sexuality, questions of female identity, the exchange between the virtual world and the real world, disfiguration and re-figuration Caterina Pasqualino, Deep Voices: From Ritual to Contemporary Art What hoarse, trembling, clipped voices have in common when seen in such diverse cultures as the Palo religion in Cuba, Andalusian gypsy flamenco, or avantgarde creations by Occidental artists (Schwitters, Dubuffet…)? In so-called ‘traditional’ cultures, voices expressed in rough, guttural sounds evoke the unarticulated speech of the dead For Western artists, they constitute the search for original meaning, freed from the yoke of convention In both cases, the deconstruction of the voice and word express a similar desire to go beyond something human Here, the author proposes to go beyond the religious or aesthetic separations that distinguish ritual and artistic action in order to privilege a common approach that will further the development of a general theory of performance After much research on the minorities of the Mediterranean basin (which led to the work Da Milocca has Milena A villaggio siciliano vent' anni dopo, Edizioni Scientifiche italiane, 1989, Naples), Caterina Pasqualino began her research on gypsy populations Her second work, Dire le chant Les Gitans flamencos d'Andalousie (CNRS edition MSH, Paris, 1998) was highly innovative in, among other aspects, her approach to Andalusian flamenco, a musical genre usually perceived in picturesque or musicological terms, from an anthropological viewpoint Her recent work has led her to question the concept of artistic and ritual performance, which she examines in relation to new work undertaken in Cuba and Madrid, as well as in terms of topics related to contemporary art, such as pilgrimage, trance, and vocal experimentation Bibliography: “The Gypsies, Poor but Happy: A Cinematic Myth,” (Third Text, 2008), “Le ralenti comme instrument de connaissance Filmer les chants gitans,” in Ethnomusicologie et anthropologie musicale historique de l'espace franỗais (LHarmattan, 2008), “Filming emotion: The Place of Video in Anthropology,” Visual Anthropology Review, special issue on European Anthropology, co-editors Peter di Biella and Colette Piault (2007) She has also directed documentary films (Des chants pour le ciel Les saetas des Gitans d’Andalousie, Espagne, produced by CNRS image-média, with the support of the Centre National de la Cinématographie, 52’, 2003; Petit théâtre napolitain, CNRS, 56’, Naples-Paris, 2006 Richard Schechner, Self-Inflicted Wounds/Art/Ritual/Popular Culture People voluntarily and intentionally, but not fatally, wound themselves across a wide range of actions from sub-incision to "delicate self-mutilation" to performance art Why? Some wounds are required by religion; some are expressions of personal taste and/or popular culture; some are art Are these conceptual-social domains related to each other? Are they related to surgery? Is self-wounding as art a special category? Is there any fundamental theoretical proposition that can encompass all categories of self-wounding? Richard Schechner is University Professor/Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University His BA is from Cornell University, MA from the University of Iowa, and PhD from Tulane University In March 2005 the Richard Schechner Center for Performance Studies was inaugurated as part of the Shanghai Theatre Academy, where Schechner is an Honorary Professor He is editor of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies and artistic director of East Coast Artists Schechner is the author of a number of books, including Public Domain, Environmental Theatre, The End of Humanism, Performance Theory, Between Theatre and Anthropology, The Future of Ritual, Performance Studies—An Introduction, and Over, Under, and Around His books have been translated into Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, French, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, German, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, and Bulgarian In 1967, Schechner founded The Performance Group in New York With TPG, Schechner directed some notable productions including Dionysus in 69, Mother Courage and Her Children, Oedipus, The Tooth of Crime, and The Balcony Currently as artistic director of East Coast Artists, Schechner has directed his own version of the Faust legend, Faust/gastronome, Three Sisters, Hamlet, and YokastaS Redux (co-authored with Saviana Stanescu) Overseas, Schechner has directed The Cherry Orchard with the Repertory Theatre of the National School of Drama in New Delhi, August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for the Grahamstown Festival in South Africa, Sun Huizhu’s Tomorrow He’ll Be Out of the Mountains at Shanghai’ Peoples’ Art Theatre, and The Oresteia (his own adaptation) with the Contemporary Legend Theatre of Taiwan In 2007, in Shanghai, he directed Hamlet: That Is the Question – an experimental version of Shakespeare’s play, which will tour to Europe in 2009 Schechner has conducted performance workshops in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America Arnd Schneider, Contested Grounds: Appropriation and Performance in Collaborations with Artists in Argentina Every year, the inhabitants of the Santa Ana village in Argentina celebrate their patron saint on July 26th This project involved collaboration with contemporary visual artists from the nearby provincial capital, Corrientes, and the making of a series of hybrid ‘works’ between art and anthropology This included material participation in (rather than ‘observation of’) the performance of the procession, i.e making a new dress for the saint’s statue, producing a video, and field notes The appropriation of and material intervention into a setting of popular religiosity raises questions about the epistemological status of art – anthropology collaborations as hybrid knowledge productions Arnd Schneider is Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo He obtained his Ph.D from the LSE (1992), and degree of Habilitation from the University of Hamburg (2006) Among his books are Futures Lost: Nostalgia and Identity among Italian Immigrants in Argentina (Berne/New York: Peter Lang) Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina (New York: Palgrave, 2006), and Contemporary Art and Anthropology (co-edited with Chris Wright; Oxford: Berg, 2006) Arnd Schneider co-organised Fieldworks: Dialogues between Art and Anthropology, at the Tate Modern, 2003; organised the International Symposium, Art/Anthropology: Practices of Differences and Translation, at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, 2007; and was co-curator of The World Kaleidoscope: Images and Objects from Fieldwork in Anthropological Research, at Galleri Sverdrup and the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, 2008 Marthe Thorshaug, Comancheria Norwegian artist Marthe Thorshaug will show extracts from her film Comancheria, a ‘road movie’ starring the Comanche Indians in Oklahoma, USA Thorshaug will talk about the film and about the artist as ‘trickster.’ Marthe Thorshaug is an artist who lives and works in Norway Thorshaug produces films and photography that linger in a world between reality and fiction Barthélémy Toguo, Circumcision, series "Circumcision, série" is a series of three video projects in which the artist reveals the trauma caused by the brutality of the circumcision of young boys in certain West African countries In the first, the artist sits on top of a woodpile, wearing white boxer shorts stained with blood, and uses an axe to split the trunk holding him up The gesture is slow, with the rhythm of a metronome, and finishes with a scream In the second, shot with a camera at ground level, he slowly strips himself of his clothes by twisting his body on the ground; the shot finishes with a close-up on the bloodstained shorts Last, he is seated on a chair, and a tracking shot moves along his body; he rises, a bloodstained towel around him Barthélémy Toguo is an artist from Cameroon who is well known on the international art scene He lives and works in both Paris and Bandjoun (Cameroon) He works in several mediums, including performance, sculpture, watercolour, and video His work deals with the accumulation and proliferation of signs that disturb and question stereotypes and rifts between the “Western” world and the “non-Western” world In his practice, these two aesthetics clash, stigmatizing his personal path and his being uprooted Since 1996, he has been working on his series “Transit.” These performances always take place in airports, railway stations, or other places of travel and crossing over The artist presents himself for boarding at the Roissy-Charles De Gaulle airport, carrying a pouch filled with Carambars But upon arrival in Africa, when he recovers his luggage, he is challenged by customs agents, who believe his bags are full of wood Dressed as a street sweeper, he takes a first-class seat on the Thalys train from Cologne to Paris He intentionally makes his fellow travellers uncomfortable, and his behaviour drives the conductor to threats of throwing him off the train Humour and a certain kind of provocation are thus prominent in his work Chris Wright, Observation and Context Anthropologists often criticize contemporary art as failing to provide the kinds of contextualization they consider essential to their discipline This misperception allows them to dismiss works of art easily In addition, the concern for contextualization, when taken by anthropologists as a rationale for producing visual work, often results in films utterly lacking vital elements of the events they supposedly set out to portray Art critics often refer to the work of artist Cameron Jamie as “backyard anthropology" because it documents elements of popular culture Using a clip from one of Jamie’s recent films, Chris Wright will argue that often it is precisely this lack of context that is key to experiencing film and to understanding events This argument will be further developed using clips from observational films by anthropologist John Marshall and another contemporary artist, Ron Lapid Chris Wright originally trained in visual arts and now runs the MA Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths, London He has carried out research on the relations between photography, materiality, and memory in the Solomon Islands and was co-editor (with Arnd Schneider) of Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Berg, 2006) In 2007, he coorganised the “Beyond Text?” conference at the University of Manchester  ... summer Uncompromising and stripped of any voiceover, his project reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, landscapes and climates, vulnerability and violence are brought... printmaking, and drawing to question art and life, the familiar and the extraordinary, the epic and the banal, and the "slow time" of the present, which contains the traces of the past and also initiates... Paris and Bandjoun (Cameroon) He works in several mediums, including performance, sculpture, watercolour, and video His work deals with the accumulation and proliferation of signs that disturb and