IVSA Showcase

In the 1970s and 1980s, young activists discovered video as a new medium and used moving images in their struggle for access to cultural expression for the many, not the few. They were researching and developing new forms of independent and participatory media work – an important step towards realizing the utopian promises of the digital age.

This observational ethnographic film (“ethnografilm”) chronicles the daily lives of Diablo Steve and Sapphire Pam, a homeless and heroin-dependent married couple.

Over the last 2 years, Hilary Pilkington has been conducting (overt) ethnographic research with a number of divisions of the English Defence League under the auspices of the MYPLACE project. As part of this research she and the filmmaker – Dmitry Omelchenko obtained a visual material completed into film.

Symbology of Interculturalism is a performance that takes place in the city of Guayaquil in an attempt to construct knowledge together with its people. The performance is supported by Intercultural Cardboard Press, Community Art Practices Lab with the intention to conduct interdisciplinary research upon interculturalism as a research topic.

This documentary has been created as part of the Digital Anthropology (MSc) program at UCL and has been nominated one of the three best films in the autumn/winter class in 2012. It is about Ozan Figani’s life, a hairdresser originally from Turkey, Anatolia, who owns a traditional Salon in East London. Little by little he starts to reveal his true first job (music and poem writing).

I present the installation Geographies of the Imagination, an arts-based ethnography about long-term exile, as a form of public ethnography that unveils the acquisition and transmission of ethnographic knowledge as interactive, emergent, and creative.

Participatory video is a growing area of research and an increasingly popular tool among researchers and NGOs working with communities around the world. The Handbook of Participatory Video advances the field, engaging critically with it as a research methodology and method and interrogating assumptions about its emancipatory nature and potential for social change.