"Nani Ghar / नानी घर Images meant the truth; in our school textbooks, of our childhood and definitely of the world beyond; or so we believed. The authority of images as truth was only challenged when I started to make my own (images and meanings). To make my images was to build my world, the autonomy in authorship was liberating but soon, one realizes that this autonomy is a consequence of privilege.Image-making has become an integral part of our lives. We are photographing and filming our food, our friends/family and also ourselves constantly. One can accept this as a practice of creating and maintaining an archive, a live archive that will influence our understanding of our past and hence ourselves. We are heavily into the creation of our image not just for today, but for the years and generations to come. How can this archive then be read and does it communicate a sense of our identity? My grandmother and I ask each other where we are from, individually and collectively, as citizens of the world. We reflect together, she with her shard of mirror and I, with mine. The only scope for mistake in this process is to believe that our shard can reflect the whole truth."

"Hello, I’m Savyasachi and I record everyday videos, sounds and images. Sometimes I make films out of them and sometimes I just play them back to myself. I am primarily interested in the everyday mundane and its reflections/influences on the lives of people across generations and cultures. At present, I am interested in exploring the relationships between photography and film as a medium, as a mode of representation and as a form of public archive/documentation."
"Hello, I am Harsha Menon and I make films and sound pieces for the cinema and gallery. As an artist and anthropologist, I am interested in post-colonial theory, social practice, sonic ethnography, and transnational feminisms. I teach contemporary art, film and visual anthropology. My present project explores friendship as an aesthetic at a Buddhist nunnery."

ANTART FieldWorks #10: Savyasachi Anju Prabir and Harsha Menon

The DicionáriosDeArtista (ArtistDictionaries) project started in 2010 and consists of a set of artist’s books, produced in Mozambique, Portugal, China, and Norway. The main objective is to create a compilation of graphic reflections on my relationship with places and their local culture.
It is site-specific, involves fieldwork and mixes drawing with hints of autoethnography. Using memory, self-reflection and imagination, Filipa takes a personal and self-referential investigation into certain aspects of contemporary culture and society. The specificities of the place are observed and lived but also viewed as an object for reflexive inquiry.

Filipa Pontes is a Portuguese visual artist and researcher. She pursues a degree in Graphic Design (ESAD.CR, Caldas da Rainha, Portugal, 2005), a postgraduation in Creative Illustration (EINA, Barcelona, Spain, 2007) and a PhD in Fine Arts – Drawing (FBAUL, Lisbon, Portugal, 2020). She connects art practice with a socially engaged perspective rooted in a self-reflexive approach. Filipa Pontes works mainly in the drawing field to create performances, installations, and artist books. In the last ten years, she has participated in international exhibitions and artistic residencies. She also works as an independent curator and as a lecturer. She lives between Berlin and Lisbon.

Aina Azevedo is a Lecturer at Universidade Federal da Paraíba (Brazil). Since 2010, during her doctoral fieldwork in South Africa, she started to draw in her notebooks and became interested in the recognition of drawing in anthropology. She published articles about drawing as a research methodology and a way of displaying knowledge in anthropology, produced graphic essays, and also investigated the historical presence of drawing in anthropology since the dawn of the discipline and its developments today. In addition, she has been developing workshops on drawing and anthropology regularly, seeking to invite other anthropologists to draw. Aina is part of the Visual Anthropology Committee (CAV) of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology (ABA) and curated the first Exhibition of Ethnographic Drawing of this association in 2020.

Literature in order of mention:
Marie Louise Pratt “The Art of Contact Zones” , 1991
Drucker, J. (1995). The century of artists’ books (2. ed). Granary Books.
Lyons, J. (Ed.). (1985). Artists’ books: A critical anthology and sourcebook. Peregrine Smith Books.
Plaza, J. (1982, Abril). O livro como forma de arte (I). Arte em São Paulo, 6, sem paginação.
Pratt, M. L. (1994). Transculturation and autoethnography: Peru, 1615/1980. Em Colonial discourse, postcolonial theory (Barker, Francis; Hulme, Peter; Iversen, Margaret, pp. 24–46). Manchester Univ. Press.
Reed-Danahay, D. (Ed.). (1997). Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social. Berg.

ANTART FieldWorks #4: Filipa Pontes & Aina Azevedo

For anthropologists and artists “doing fieldwork” in contemporary worlds, art can be much more than an object of investigation. Curation and creation through visual, audio, or performing arts are at the heart of their work, extending the established anthropological interest in writing as a medium of thought and knowledge sharing. This exhibition presents works by anthropologists and artists who break disciplinary boundaries, and whose practice foregrounds experimental, and open approaches to the theme “field/works”. 

This series is curated by Jen Clarke and Maxime Le Calvé. We intend to provide a new space for discussion around and across the thematic of the virtual exhibition "Field/Works": https://antart.easaonline.org/ 

All members of ANTART (EASA) are all invited to attend. If you wish to participate in a particular talk with a short paper (5 minutes) which would resonate with the topic or — even better — with the artwork presented in that talk, please get in touch with us.

ANTART FieldWorks #4: Filipa Pontes & Aina Azevedo

ANT ART

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