Shadows between Worlds results from a collaboration between visual artist Christelle Becholey Besson and anthropologist/dancer Claire Vionnet. The artwork questions movement when it resonates with various sensorial materials and sounds. Human shadows interplay in different sensory environments (water, space, shell and tunnel), addressing ways movements and bodies are affected by specific sound and visual contexts. This installation is a metaphor of broader current social issues about the world we live in. A female dancer thrusts between water and space, playing with the sensoriality of the world, resonating with materials she encounters. The gesture resonates with various faces of the Anthropocene, addressing the environment we are living in. The installation invites the audience to think about the milieus that might be better welcoming our bodies in a more sustainable way. In which environment can bodies move, grow and breath organically? This project is an illustration of participative collaboration between art and anthropology, in which the research question has been formulated together in an ongoing conversation.

Claire Vionnet is an Anthropologist, Dance Scholar and Dancer. She wrote a PhD on the creation of gestures in contemporary dance, exploring notions of body, improvisation, senses, shadow/ghost, production processes, autoethnography, phenomenology. She works creatively with dance communities (West African Dances, Contemporary Dance, Contact Improvisation), reflecting on the way art/dance produces knowledge. Marked by her time lived in Africa, she is particularly interested in the role humanities play in society and keen to reflect on better reuniting Anthropology, Art and Society. She develops alternative forms of ethnographic restitution (video-essay, lecture-performance, performative dialogs in festivals) to reach a broader audience beyond Academia.


Christelle Becholey Besson was born in 1985 in Switzerland, she lives and works in Vancouver.
“In my practice, I like to follow my curiosity, which takes me in unfamiliar places. I then use and misuse art to shape fictional narratives and create atmospheres from parallel times. Collaboration is essential to my creative process. Sharing bring complexity and chaos to the linear thinking and give me more unknown”.

ANTART Field/Works Talk #8: Claire Vionnet & Christelle Becholey Besson

"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

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 Field/Works Talk #8: Claire Vionnet & Christelle Becholey Besson

ANT ART

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