Ethnographic Terminalia is sponsoring a Roundtable Discussion at the Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, and an Art Spill off-site Panel Discussion. See the details below…
Du Mois Gallery 2010
Ethnographic termini:
Moving and agitating within the borderlands of contemporary art and ethnography.
Saturday, November 20. 10:15am – noon.
Grand Ballroom E, Fifth Floor, Sheraton Conference Center
This round-table is a node within a network of off-site activities and exhibitions called Ethnographic Terminalia. It is specifically organized according to the theme of the 2010 American Anthropological Association meeting, “Circulation.” The various nodes of the Ethnographic Terminalia project together work to redraw lines between ethnography and art (as well as science, activism, and education) by drawing the bodies and ideas of visiting scholars into close contact and conversation with flows of public life and knowledge production in New Orleans. Building on the end/s of anthropology, we work to move beyond discussing those end/s, toward active and collaborative encounters among the people, ideas, and things circulating in New Orleans and beyond. The participants in this round-table present a variety of departure points for thinking through the problematics of art, ethnography and exhibition that cross scholarly, public, and artistic practices. Under the broad rubric of installation and design we present distinct views and experiences of creating, curating, exhibiting, and viewing (or experiencing). The moderated discussion will rely on concrete examples of exhibitions, interspersed with the arguments and discussions of the participants.
The theme of circulation works as a metaphor for states of perpetual motion. What it doesn’t do is provide a sense of the stability of flows. Are paths of circulation established or emergent? Are they multiple or singular? What is the nature of their motivation? This panel aims to explore circulation in terms of the flow of ideas, experiences, and articulations of contemporary artists and ethnographers as well as the productive gray zones between these sometimes stultifying categories. If institutions have come to largely shape the efforts of these practitioners, we ask, what learning do they have to offer one another beyond simple appropriations? Another side of circulating is agitating, its motion less predictable, a more apt metaphor for the exchanges being discussed here. Agitating happens between, while circulating occurs through, sites of exhibition, sites of research, and sites of production, and back again. The lecture hall, the project space, the gallery, the class room, the space of the monograph or the journal, subversive spaces, the website: all of these, are imagined within a discursive geography of connections and non-connections. The goal here is to bring artists, ethnographers, and curators into close proximity to see what happens when their discursive approaches brush up against one another. This notion of proximity must also be central to the guiding theme of the conference: circulations. This round-table is in its own way performative of circulations. As a generative project it reflects the larger program of Ethnographic Terminalia, which is to hasten and amplify circulations between different creative actors.
Organizers: Craig Campbell and Maria Brodine.
Participants:
- Craig Campbell
- Tarek Elhaik
- Fiamma Montezemolo
- Morgana King
- Nicky Levell and Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas
- Thomas Ross Miller
Du Mois Gallery 2010
Art Spill Panel Discussion
November 20, 6:00pm-7:30pm,
St. Claude Arts District in The Marigny,
2822 St. Claude Avenue, New Orleans
This offsite panel works in a complementary way with the Ethnographic Terminalia Roundtable titled “Ethnographic termini: moving and agitating within the borderlands of contemporary art and ethnography”. Building on the end/s of anthropology, we work to move beyond discussing those end/s, toward active and collaborative encounters among the people, ideas, and things circulating in New Orleans and beyond. This panel, featuring participants who work or have worked in New Orleans as artists, activists, and scholars, seeks to bring local artists and art works into anthropological conversations about the role of the arts, activism, and scholarship in the revealing of disaster, the facilitation of recovery, and political action. Participants will be encouraged to use their personal biographies to explore tensions around art and technology, the roles of publics and experts, and the relationship between nature and culture.
Participants:
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- Barbara Allen (Anthropologist, STS Scholar – author of Chemical Corridor, Virginia Tech)
- Craig Colten (Anthropologist, Geographer – author of An Unnatural Metropolis, Louisiana State University)
- Jac Currie (Defend New Orleans)
- Dawn DeDeaux (Independent Artist)
- José Torres-Tama (Visual Artist – Artefuturo Productions)
- Elizabeth Underwood (AORTA projects)
