VRN 2019 CONFERENCE

DAY 1 - 5th OF SEPTEMBER

Conference Schedule

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Marieke Vandecasteele

RE-TOUCHE 

RE-STITCHING FAMILY FISSURES THROUGH IMAGINATION ​
My work is a visual-ethnographic study about growing up with a family member with a disability focused on creativity that lives within families. At the conference I would like to highlight some aspects of my second graphic project titled RE-TOUCHE.
Marieke Vandecasteele graduated in 2012 in Special Needs Education at Ghent University. After her graduation, she started a short film about her brother. Since 2014 she could continue with her visual ethnographic project in the context of a PhD in Disability Studies (Ghent University).

Subir Che Selia

SENSING BERLIN

A RE-PRESENTATION OF THE BLIND’S PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE  IN A DOCUMENTARY  ​
My research concerns the audio-visual aesthetics of seeing and blindness in general and the phenomenological experience of determining the visually indeterminate in the blind from the sighted perspective in particular. I am currently working towards an audiovisual essay about the blind’s perceptual experience of Berlin, whereby it explores the inter-relation of seeing, blindness, imagination, and imagery in perception.
Subir Che Selia is a Ph.D candidate in Media Art & Design at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany whose work focuses on phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to documentary. He holds an MA degree in Media Art & Design and a BSc. degree in Architecture Studies.

 Lea Vinter Sonne

CREATING A NEW LANGUAGE 

ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS THROUGH SOUND AND IMAGE
How can we through sound, image and participatory filmmaking create an open space and a new language about mental illness? A language that goes beyond illnesses, fixed boxes and diagnosis. At the conference I would like to invite you into the creation of a new short film with and about my good friend, Freja.
Visual anthropologist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen, DK. I hold an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester and studied film and photography at Fatamorgana – The Danish School of Art Photography. I currently work in the Danish film and TV industry.
FILM SCREENING SESSION 1  
09.30 – 11.00  GCVA Screening Room - Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
Paloma Yánez and Benjamin Llorens

 THE END OF AN ERA, A STORY OF OIL WORKERS ​I 92 min

Ten exploration workers from the oil and gas industry talk to camera for the first time in their life. As earth scientists, and as members of the energy industry, they claim a place to talk about their industry and its future. The film journeys from Brazil to Norway, unveiling different realities inside the oil industry as well as how oil workers negotiate, on a personal level and as members of their society, their ethical positions towards climate issues, renewable energies and the future of oil.
Paloma is an independent ethnographic filmmaker  interested in the methods of adaptation humans develop to address changing environment, technology and political conflicts. She is currently doing a PhD in visual anthropology at the University of Manchester studying people’s adaptation to industrial agriculture and changing landscape in the south of Spain.​

Benjamin has a history degree from the University of Alicante but following his passion he became a self taught audiovisual producer. He works as a freelance filmmaker and a sound recordist for the Big Tree Collective since 2015, being involved in film productions in Congo,  Lebanon, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Norway and UK.
Panel 2 REPRESENTING THE HUMAN
11.15 – 12.30  Room G32  Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
Chaired by Amber Kale

Qasim Riza Shaheen

QASIM FILMWALLAH 

Qasim Riza Shaheen shares a series of Snapchat recordings in which he engages with the act of embodying the songs of playback singers and the mimetics of the actor in South Asian film cultures.  In this presentation he uses the frame of social media applications as he queers and questions modes of representing power, love and desire.
Qasim Riza Shaheen is Associate Artist at HOME in Manchester. He is currently pursuing his doctoral research through professional practice at Manchester School of Art.
​His website is www.qasimrizashaheen.com

David Johnson

OBJECT LESSONS:  ​​

ENTANGLEMENTS WITH MY PERSONAL POSSESSIONS AND OTHER OBJECT STORIES
In routine activities such as arranging one’s desk, maintenance of a bicycle, display of objects, packing up to move, I am interested in those moments where our everyday objects emerge into view and a moment of reflection and engagement is engendered: to acknowledge, to manifest emotions towards, to express gratitude for or disdain. This moment of recognition - what more does it tell us? What is its value? How might we respond further?
David Johnson is currently a PhD researcher in Architecture at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on our entanglements with everyday objects and the aesthetic modes of reception that emerge from these relationships.
FILM SCREENING SESSION 2 
11.15 – 12.30  GCVA Screening Room - Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
Chaired by Alex Martin
Angelica Cabezas

THIS IS MY FACE ​I 58 min

In Chile, people living with HIV fear stigma. Because of this, they conceal their condition and remain silent about what they are going through. ´This is my Face´ explores what happens when men living with the virus open up about the illness that changed their life trajectories by creating autobiographical photos. This film follows their creative process, from which emerged intimate images that challenge years of silence and misrepresentation.
Angélica Cabezas Pino received a PhD in Anthropology, Media and Performance at the University of Manchester. During the last years, she has been experimenting with visual methods to explore trauma and illness, in an intersection of medical and public anthropology. Her current project is on participatory video with women living in refugee settlements in Jordan and Bangladesh, funded by UNWomen.
Panel 3 VR TECHNOLOGIES AND THE AESTHETIC
13.30 – 15.00  Room G32  Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
​Chaired by Ian Costabile

Maria Nastase

SONIC IMAGES

Sonic Images have their roots in pixel sonification, specifically mapping the sound frequencies of a recorded soundscape to pixels brightness and colors. Hovering over the picture with the mouse, the digital image is perceived as a physical object with its respective space and temporal dimension. I am working towards developing this interactive medium of audio exploration of visible and cultural environments and hope to contribute to extra textual frameworks of scholarly practices.
Maria Năstase studied anthropology at the University of Bucharest and ethnographic filmmaking at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in Manchester. She is currently doing an MA in Interactive Technologies for Performative and Media Arts at CINETic (The International Center for Research and Education in Innovative Creative Technologies) in Bucharest. She is exploiting the democratization of technology to experiment with digital artistic practices as a medium for knowledge production and distribution.

Antonio Cadierno

ANTHROVR

EXPERIENCING OTHERNESS, APPROACHING REALITIES 
Why did we fall in love with anthropology and the Human being? Let's make the others experience it!!! New audiovisual, immersive and interactive technologies can help visual anthropologist researchers to reach, impact or provoque a change in a wider audience when capturing and exhibiting human reality.
Audiovisual Anthropologist, I have made numerous documentaries and I love exploring new ways of exposing reality. Founder of AntropoDocs & Films, professor in some courses/master of transmedia anthropology, co-director of the MAAM and curator of exhibitions at the National Museum of Anthropology Madrid 
FILM SCREENING SESSION 3
13.30 – 15.00  GCVA Screening Room - Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
Chaired by Alex Pegge

Paola Garnica and
Arturo Gutiérrez

...I WON’T LEAVE MY  NEIGHBOURHOOD! I 65 min

"... ¡Y del barrio no me voy! [...I won't leave my neighbourhood!]" is a documentary that shows the perception and social ties of the people that have remained in the seven traditional neighbourhoods of San Luis Potosí, México, and that have resisted the pressures of a so-called modernisation. Along with the voices of local academics, it reveals the problems, challenges and misleading discourses of failed governments that have provoked the wear and tear of these spaces.
Paola Garnica is an anthropologist and full-time researcher in the Programme of Anthropological Studies at El Colegio de San Luis, Mexico; she is interested in non-verbal communication, the perception of urban spaces and collaborative audiovisual methods.

​Arturo Gutiérrez del Ángel is a photographer, anthropologist and full-time researcher in the Programme of Anthropological Studies at El Colegio de San Luis, Mexico; he is interested in mythology, rites and religion of Northern Mexico.
Panel 4 THE HUMAN AND THE RESISTANCE 
15.15 – 17.45  Room G32  Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
Chaired by Benjamin Llorens

Umberto Cao

LUZ Y FUERZA DEL PUEBLO

The project Umberto is working on is an ethnographic documentary about “Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo”, a civil resistance movement from Chiapas, Mexico, which has also been the subject of his PhD dissertation.
Umberto Cao has just obtained a PhD in Anthropology at EHESS. He has worked several years in the field of international cooperation. He eventually turned his interest towards visual anthropology, particularly on contemporary murals and ethnographic documentaries.

Jenna Keiper

THE EMBODIED BRAIN  

AN AUDIOVISUAL EXPLORATION OF MIND/BODY CONNECTION 
Where does individual movement come from? How does our inner landscape affect outer movement and vice versa? Using exploratory interview techniques and audiovisual methods, we engage the body and mind together in a philosophical film installation.
Jenna Keiper is a filmmaker, dancer and interdisciplinary artist originally from Seattle, United States. Her love of school led to a BFA/BA dual degree specializing in interdisciplinary collaboration while her love of performance led to a career in concert and commercial dance. She is currently based in Germany at the University of Münster studying for a master’s degree in Visual Anthropology, Media Studies and Documentary Practice.

Jose Luis Fajardo

 FOLLOWING THE PAPA NATIVA 

 THE MAKING OF THE PHOTOBOOK
Peru was the centre of origin and diversity of more than 3,000 varieties of native potato—one of the most important food crops worldwide—however only around five types are typically consumed beyond the Andean towns. In the context of the Peruvian “Gastronomic Boom”, some native potato varieties are starting to be commercialised for their "native" properties and have thus become more widely consumed in Lima. The photobook is a photographic representation that aims to visualise the fragmented nature of this potato chain, from their growing sites in the Central Peruvian Andes to luxury restaurants in Lima.
I am from Mexico and recently finished a PhD in social and visual anthropology at the University of Manchester. I am interested in the evocative potential of photography and film as strategies for social research and representation. ​
FILM SCREENING SESSION 4
​15.15 – 17.45  GCVA Screening Room - Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
Chaired by Eduard Vasile

​Iria Sanjurjo

SERPARI I 21 min

Serpari is the third piece of the series "Rituals and ancestral festivals of the Iberian Peninsula and Europe". From the perspective of a snake we attend one of the most peculiar rituals in the area of Aquila, Italy dedicated to the Abbot San Domenico.
​Film and video editor with a trajectory of over 10 years. Experienced in the edition of documentaries, films, video reports, advertisement, trailers and video-clips. I also work as a director and camera in my own productions.

​Iria Sanjurjo

​JARRAMPLAS I 9.40 min

Jarramplas is the second piece of the series "Rituals and ancestral festivals of the Iberian Peninsula and Europe". The origin of this ritual is uncertain. The inhabitants of the village of Piornal, Extremadura, Spain, play the role of a popular execution to an old cattle thief.
Film and video editor with a trajectory of over 10 years. Experienced in the edition of documentaries, films, video reports, advertisement, trailers and video-clips. I also work as a director and camera in my own productions.

Patricia Bermudez

SACHA MAMAKUNA -
MAMÁS DE LA SELVA I 80 min

​The documentary film Sacha Mamakuna - Mamás de la Selva tells how mothers from the Association of Women Midwives Kichwas from Alto Napo, AMUPAKIN learn from women's knowledge and gifts (pajuyukhuna). The film tells stories about medicine, plants, midwifery and shamanism, and it shows how these women put into practice this knowledge, to reaffirm their status as Kichwa woman leaders. In a close, intimate and collaborative manner, their voices and practices are living accounts of collective resistance that reaffirm their identity and culture, a culture that faces complex changes due to modernity, state power, authorities, and the public health system. The documentary is part of a larger effort to instill the values of Kichwa practices and culture among the younger generations.
Visual anthropologist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen, DK. I hold an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester and studied film and photography at Fatamorgana – The Danish School of Art Photography. I currently work in the Danish film and TV industry.

DAY 2 - 6th OF SEPTEMBER

Keynote Speech AND SCREENING 
10.00 – 12.00  HOME CINEMA
Chaired by Lana Askari

Catarina Alves Costa 

​JOURNEY TO MAKONDE I 60 min

A journey to Mozambique in the search of a hidden story with an experimental use of film archives and a subjective narration. This documentary portrays Mar-got Dias, an ethnologist who filmed between 1958 and 1961 among the Makonde people in North Mozambique. The film is also around what we cannot see in the imag-es the ethnologist made, what is behind her. An inward journey that will gradually untie the circumstances in which these original films were made: during the period of Portuguese colonial rule of Mozambique. We use Margot’s unpublished diary and other texts she wrote, together with a subjective voice by the filmmaker to reflect on the ambivalence of this encounter.
Catarina Alves Costa is a director, producer and teacher. In 2016 she organized and added sound to the DVD edited by the Portuguese Cinemateque Margot Dias: ethnographic films 1958-1961. Since 1997 she has taught in the areas of visual anthropology and ethno-graphic film as a professor at the Nova University in Lisbon where she coordinates the master’s degree in Visual Cultures. She is an integrated researcher at CRIA, Research Network NAVA, Visual Anthropology and the Arts. Hers films circulate at international fes-tivals such as the Jean Rouch Film Festival, NAFA Festi-val, Cinéma du Réel or the Margaret Mead Film Festival.
Delegates LUNCH
12.20 – 13.20  HOME CINEMA​
Panel 5 THE HUMAN AND THE RESISTANCE
13.00 – 14.30  70 Oxford St  (Old CORNERHOUSE THEATRE)
​Chaired by Jose Luis Fajardo

Jong-Min Jeong

RETHINKING REPETITION IN DEMENTIA​

THROUGH CARTOGRAPHIC ETHNOGRAPHY OF SUBJECTIVITY 
Rather than hastily translating and interpreting repetitive bodily practices within a dementia context as pathological and abnormal, I approach them through a cartographic ethnography, with particular attention to the affective dynamics of repetition in a Jewish care home in London. Critically developing Deligny’s cartographic approach in dialogue with Ingold’s notion of dwelling, I demonstrate affect underpinned encounters and interactions of repetitive phenomena in terms of relational and affective affordance among those involved in the generation of a specific atmosphere at breakfast. Paper accepted for publication from Medicine, Anthropology and Theory.
Jong-min Jeong has a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester

Olivia Casagrande

MAPSURBE  

​THE INVISIBLE CITY 
Driving on the theoretical and epistemological significance of collective creative work with young Mapuche artists and intellectuals in Santiago (Chile), our work explores subversive aesthetics and imaginations as ways of producing meanings and knowledge. The site-specific theatre performance ‘Santiago Waria’ resulted from the exercise of thinking through the city, at the intersection of the materiality of urban space materiality and the immaterial practices, interpretations and lived experiences of the Mapuche diaspora.
I am Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, School of Social Sciences, and board member of Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design (Brussels). Since 2008 I have been working on politics, violence and memory, and urban anthropology mainly in Santiago and in Southern Chile. After working extensively on storytelling and biographical methods, in my current research project I am exploring performance, theatre and art in order to develop participatory and practice-based methodologies.

Ian Costabile

SOUND GRAFFITI

Sound Graffiti is a series of installations of interactive sonic networks in urban areas. Walls are sprayed with sound and sensors, where multiple loudspeakers interact to express statements and harmonise with city and machinery sounds.
Ian Costabile is based at the University of Liverpool and is currently undertaking practice-based research in composition. He focuses his work on interactive sound spaces, particularly through spatial music, site-specific composition, three-dimensional soundscapes and sensor-based interactive media.
FILM SCREENING SESSION 5
​14.50 – 17.50  70 Oxford St (CORNERHOUSE THEATRE )
​Chaired by Paloma Yáñez Serrano

Karin Leivategija

DIVERGENT SOUNDS I 39 min

"Divergent Sounds" explores the emergence of Estonian underground club scene and hiphop culture in the 1990s. Through the use of archival footage, Estonian underground music and recollections of DJs and musicians this documentary tells a story of post-socialist youth striving to create their own spaces of self-expression and music.
Karin Leivategija is a visual anthropologist and exhibition curator. Since 2014 she has been involved in curatorial and research work in Estonian National Museum. Her research interests involve post-socialist youth and contemporary night-time economy.

Alex Martin

MAGNITUDE 135 I 30 min

Through the testimony of Bea and her family, who lost their home in the magnitude 7.1 earthquake of September 19th two years ago, Magnitude 135 explores the profusion of challenges and injustices faced by the people of Morelos in the quake's aftermath. The distinctive quality of Bea's perspective stems from her synaesthesia, which, being a rare condition wherein cerebral pathways of sensory perception are intertwined, mirrors the interconnected and cumulative nature of the earthquake's consequences. Numbers carry particularly strong sensory qualities for Bea, and listening to her unique description we discover the extent of lived experience and suffering that can hide within soundbite statistics, and we begin to understand the inadequacy of a simple numerical figure such as magnitude 7.1.
Alexander Martin is a freelance visual anthropologist, videographer and musician from Derbyshire, UK, working primarily in Morelos, Mexico. Trained at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in Manchester, he has turned his efforts to social and humanitarian projects both independently and within public institutions, covering areas such as child sexual exploitation in the UK and the impacts of natural disaster and systemic abduction in Mexico. His new short film Magnitude 135, which explores a synaesthetic’s experience of the 2017 Puebla earthquake, will screen at the VRN conference 2019.

Pinelopi Tzouva ​

THE RED WHEELBARROW I 10 min

This is a short film based on my auto-ethnography as a chronically ill, working class woman that combines scenes filmed with my phone, drawings I have made, and material we have found on the internet. It has won the moving image prize of the Association for Medical Humanities. 
​Research for this work was supported by the Estonian Research Council (Grant 1481), by the European Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence in Estonian Studies), and by the Foundation for Education and European Culture.
​I hold a bachelor’s in Psychology (University of Ioannina, Greece), a Master of Science in Social and Cultural Anthropology, and a Master in Cultural Studies (both master’s from the University of Leuven). Currently, I am conducting doctoral research (University of Leuven and University of Tartu) in the field of breast cancer narratives studying, among other sources, work that finds itself in the intersection between word and image.

João Meirinhos

TRANSMUTAÇÃO I 21.40 min

“Transmutation – The beating of the last looms | part 1”, is an social appeal about the problem of ​​ the disappearance of manual weaving, and the last weavers who still working. A multimedia work that crosses an anthropological view, in which through sound and image creates an artistic narrative, we will be able to identify the key moments of the creative process during the capture of sound and the different “cadences” of each instrument of textile production, as well as the interaction / look of the director with the last weavers and spinner.
João is a filmmaker with strong inclinations towards experimental ethnography and visual art. He's been engaging with socially engaged creative organizations that focus on social justice, artivism and environmental awareness for about a decade. Since 2009 he's been running 'Cinema du Desert' with Italian NGO Bambini Nel Deserto: a solar powered mobile cinema that has taken him screening films (by land and for free) along West Africa's and Central Asia's most isolated communities. Based in Lisbon, founder of Filmes Sombra, a production company focused on Art, Audiovisual and Anthropology, has been working as a freelancer performer, self shooting director, video editor and copywriter.

Miguel Gaggiotti

ASSEMBLY I 20 min

Assembly is a reflexive documentary that meditates on working conditions in assembly plants (maquiladoras) in Ciudad Juárez (México). Shot by México and UK-based ethnographers and filmmakers 2015-2018, and edited and directed by Miguel Gaggiotti, it is part of the research project “Organising in the borderlands: applying research to support families, children and youngsters in Mexican-USA borderlands”.
​Miguel Gaggiotti is a filmmaker and lecturer in film at the University of Bristol’s Department of Film and Television. He holds a BA in Film Studies from the University of Kent and an MA in Film and TV Production from the University of Bristol. He has recently completed his PhD dissertation which explores the performances of and creative process working with nonprofessional actors in European and Latin American fiction cinemas.