RAI Research Seminar
organised by the RAI’s Ethnomusicology and Ethnochoreology Committee
Monday 31 March 2024, 4:00-6:00pm GMT
This is a hybrid event.
To join us in Peron at the RAI (50 Fitzroy Street, W1T5BT London):
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/royalanthropologicalinstituteofgreatbritain/1583322
To join us via Zoom, register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Q6o-BofMTQipkMH2LdRWCg#/registration
Collaborative Intercultural Assemblages:
Between Ethnography and Aesthetic Experimentation
with Indigenous Qom Artists from the Argentine Chaco
Silvia Citro (University of Buenos Aires, CONICET, Argentina)
Soledad Torres Agüero (University of Buenos Aires, CONICET, Argentina)
In the late 1990s, we began to do ethnographic research with the Qom people in northern Argentina, in a context of violent coloniality where their ritual practices, particularly their “ancient” music and dances, were criticised and prohibited by Indigenous evangelical churches. A decade later, a process of revaluation of these expressions commenced, prompting us to orient our methodologies towards collaborative research-creation. In this presentation, using a documentary video essay, we will outline these methodological transformations in relation to the shifting political context of the country and the debates surrounding post-, de-, and counter-coloniality. Subsequently, we will focus on a research-creation process centred around the “ancient” Qom female initiation ritual, as part of the recording of a CD and a video clip with the Qom singer Ema Cuañerí and the dance group Pocnolec. Through these audiovisual productions, we explore the epistemic potential of interdisciplinarity between ethnography and art, specifically of montages that combine nonfiction and fiction, the documented and the re-imagined, indexical citations and metaphorical re-elaborations. Finally, we analyse the epistemic, aesthetic, and micropolitical tensions inherent in these processes of collaborative and intercultural creation, where diverse ways of knowing-doing converge, and how these tensions can be managed through an ethics of reciprocity.
Silvia Citrois the General Coordinator of the Body and Performance Anthropology Group -Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires. www.antropologiadelcuerpo.com She is a Dancer, Performer and PhD in Social Anthropology. Since 1998, she has been a Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), and Professor in Arts and Anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires. She published several books and was Visiting Professor in different countries.
Soledad Torres Agüero is the co-Coordinator of the Audiovisual area of the Body and Performance Anthropology Group -Faculty of Philosophy and Letters , University of Buenos Aires. She is a photographer, filmmaker, documentary producer and PhD Social Anthropology candidate (CONICET/UBA).
