Disorientations. Between loss of meaning and knowledge: a reflection on an interdisciplinary experience in visual arts and anthropology
· Cultureblog
In September 2018, more than six months after beginning a master's degree in anthropology at Université Laval under the supervision of Natacha Gagné, I began the procedures to transfer my project into a tailor-made master's in anthropology and visual arts, co-supervised by Julie Faubert, professor at the School of Art at Université Laval. This "tailor-made" format allowed for a redefinition of the expected thesis format and required a final evaluation in both visual arts and anthropology. My research subject was then essentially anthropological. I was interested in exploring the identity processes of two groups of people who experienced mobility between Quebec and New Caledonia, a French collectivity in the Pacific: whether they were New Caledonian students training in mining techniques at cégeps in northern Quebec, or Quebec workers employed on mining sites in New Caledonia. It seemed to me that the unusual nature of these crossed mobilities between two territories with many parallels[1]should give way to another form of reflection, more sensitive but also more experimental. A subject as complex as identity processes could, in my view, only be approached by integrating an experiential and sensory approach. Finally, I wished to situate this project within the continuity of cinematographic and aesthetic approaches questioning the boundaries between the real and fiction (Bruneau 2017; Castaing-Taylor and Paravel 2012; Oppenheimer 2020; Rouch 1967; Watkins 2000).
From the first months of this interdisciplinary experience, this tailor-made master's pushed me to get into the material quickly by experimenting with different forms of audiovisual capture. I thus engaged in an iterative and constantly (re)constructing research approach, where the search for form could no longer be distinguished from the search for meaning. My initial explorations allowed me to set up an interview device on the border between a creative anthropological methodology articulated around the senses (Boudreault-Fournier 2019; Cox et al. 2016; Howes 2016; Pink 2009) and imagination (Elliott and Culhane 2017; Kazubowski-Houston and Magnat 2018), as well as an art form inspired by relational artistic practices (Bourriaud 1998). By "landscape recordings" I named my interview device, which consisted of asking each participant to close their eyes and evoke, in response to my questions, several inner "landscapes" resonating with different concepts, such as "the center," "home," "belonging," or "the country." Collected both in Quebec and in New Caledonia, these "landscape recordings," complemented by a semi-structured interview, would become an original raw material enabling the exploration of identity processes as well as each participant's imaginative space. In a second phase, they would allow me to connect participants of Caledonian origin with those of Quebec origin. By filming each participant as they listened to and repeated another participant's "landscape recordings," my interview device also made an artistic exploration possible, both aesthetic and anthropological.
Screenshot of 9 "landscape sharings". On each of the 9 screens, you can see the earpiece that allows one of the participants to listen to and repeat the other participant's interview. Although these two participants had never met, video editing ultimately allowed me to merge together two video sequences filmed several months apart and thousands of kilometers away, while playing with the timing offsets between the two voices.
These "pairs" of participants, who had all experienced crossed mobilities without meeting, ultimately came, thanks to this device, to invite themselves into a body and an imaginative space foreign to their own. This relational device, which I subsequently called "landscape sharings," allowed me to create an anthropological experience both for the project's participants and for the visitors of the videographic installation created a few months later.
Photograph of the back of the videographic installation "Les Dépaysements." 37-minute video loop with a stereo track played through two amplifiers. Double projection screen of 9×5 feet per screen.
Photograph of the front of the videographic installation "Les Dépaysements." Video loop (4min20) with a mono track broadcast through two headphones. Double projection screen of 9×5 feet per screen.
Projected on two angled screens joined at their center, the installation then consisted of a 37-minute video montage with stereo audio output. It was introduced on the front by a projection of Caledonian and Quebec forests with inverted soundscapes [2]. Projected with no text or subtitles, several video excerpts from the main montage simultaneously showed the initial "landscape recordings" and their "repetition" by another participant. Although the earpiece allowing the participant to hear and repeat the other participant's words was visible and not concealed from viewers, an effect of "disorientation" could potentially creep into the visitors' perception. Faced with these two faces confronting each other and evoking one and the same very intimate memory of places, sensations or known people, the visitor could in turn question themselves on different levels: who are these people and in what ways do we identify and situate them? To whom do these stories, these places, these sensations and these memories belong? How is this sliding of self toward the other experienced and, finally, how can we imagine ourselves together beyond our different origins and life horizons? Based on a reflection on belonging, identity and otherness, this videographic installation made an anthropological questioning emerge in the visitor not only through the reading of a text but through the physical and sensory experience of a work in space.
This tailor-made master's project ultimately allowed me to broaden my anthropological approach by anchoring it in a more aesthetic, experiential and sensory dimension, where the loss of meaning, disturbance and uncertainty in the face of perceived reality become raw materials for reflection, understanding and knowledge. By approaching the aesthetic experience as an experience of "dissensus" that gives shape to reconfigurations of the "common experience of the sensible" (Rancière 2008:70), it then appears to me that anthropology and art share enough intersections to meet and propose new paths of meaning and knowledge.
FOUQUET, Annabelle, 2020, Les Dépaysements, Interdisciplinary experience in art and anthropology on crossed mobilities between Quebec and New Caledonia, Tailor-made Master's under the supervision of Natacha Gagné (Department of Anthropology, Université Laval) and Julie Faubert (School of Art, Université Laval). Université Laval. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11794/67790
Video excerpts: https://annabellefouquet.com/Les-Depaysements
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