Connecting Art and Anthropology Workshop

Transcript of Concluding Session

Amanda Ravetz

It's nearly ten past four. We could have ten or twenty minutes now. My idea for the last hour was to try and sum up things a bit.

Rosalind Nashashibi

It would be nice to socialise and have smaller conversations if there's time for that. People might have things they want to talk to people about in unstructured space.

Amanda Ravetz

If we could very quickly do the things I feel responsible for? We could sit for ten minutes and do those and then do whatever you want to?

Anna Grimshaw

Would it make sense to have break now and have a chance to think about the three presentations and then come back?

Amanda Ravetz

How about if I say the things on my mind and you can go away knowing what they are and you can then come back and address them or not address them.

So, are there things that might not have been resolved but have changed? Is there anyway of bringing this to some – I said in my original proposal that an aim would be to work out the next lot of questions, so if anything came to you on that.

Do you want to do more with this? If so, in what way – a residency, for example at Height Gate Barn in the summer? The reports I asked for, can you give me something now or are you going to do it later? It would, be great to have some kind of token of the commitment to do something, if you can't do it now. And the question of the website. Should I say that's my job, or is that something people would like to take on? Shall we come back together at five o clock?

[later]

Erika Tan

… people's structure of showing, have they showed enough? But I think it wasn't that the structure was wrong, it's just like there were certain things that were driving people to show work, maybe it was partly the way people interpreted the idea of the object and breaking that off from their work. So maybe those sessions could have been elongated a little bit and people could have both shown their work and talked about their process there.

Amanda Ravetz

The initial plan was that people would have had … it would have taken a day and a half if people had had a half hour slot each, which would have been: object into work, and then some discussion time of maybe twenty minutes each. And that was an earlier model. It would have taken a day and a half to do that, leaving a day and a half to come together and make other relationships. And that didn't seem early enough. So we thought 'we'll give everyone less time, but at the end of Day 1 we'd all be in the same place with each other'. There was still two days left. But maybe somehow the idea of critique could've been introduced into that earlier on?

Daniel Peltz

Critique is really tricky too and how you establish trust. But I think that was something … I came in while we were still working in the chapel and saw Lucien sitting at the table with four or five people informally talking about the work. And that felt like a really valuable thing and it's hard to figure out how you could …

Anna Grimshaw

I mean I think it's been very productive and it's easy to make suggestions, but it doesn't mean …

Soumhya Venkatesan

It wasn't the political incorrectness, in some sense,

Jos van der Pol

No, but in a way people could see it like that.

Liesbeth Bik

Then in the context of all the other things, then it piles up.

Lesley Young

Because the group I was in talked about the option of role playing the scenario that you described with the Indian beggars, then moving from Goa, to Singapore – isn't that right?

Soumhya Venkatesan

No, we were just thinking about the cargo ships.

Lesley Young

Did we not talk about role-playing the conversation that each beggar would have had at the doors they knocked on?

Soumhya Venkatesan

No, that was a brief suggestion about saying things in each other's accents.

Daniel Peltz

That idea was my suggestion.

Liesbeth Bik

I wouldn't be able to do that! [laughs]

Daniel Peltz

I just felt so marked as the only American accent. I wanted to learn a British accent.

Soumhya Venkatesan

We were having a lot to drink; you have to remember that.

Daniel Peltz

I was the only one who tried it.

Lesley Young

But we used the scenario with the beggar as an episode that might have an impact, so that was good.

Soumhya Venkatesan

As someone pointed out, going for a vodka run at 10pm did say something about our working practices.

Amanda Ravetz

Does anyone have any ideas about what they want to do from here, to do with this, if anything?

Chris Wright

I'd like to be involved with the workbook and the website.

Rosalind Nashashibi

The workbook?

Chris Wright

Yes.

Amanda Ravetz

It's an idea; I might be able to get some money from MIRIAD. But that's something that came out of the project that David Chapman has been working on. So one idea I had was to make a booklet, that …

Daniel Peltz

In terms of the website, I have some really great students who work as really inexpensive labour. Talented, inexpensive labour of former students who have lots of ideas. Well not that inexpensive.

Rosalind Nashashibi

We certainly have a lot of beautiful photographs that should be used in some way other than on the web. I think I'd imagined it more as … I hadn't really thought of it as concrete outcomes like that, I'd thought of outcomes more as people staying in contact and things.

Amanda Ravetz

I meant all of those things. Concrete things and staying in contact. Or the idea came up in our group of something on the model of an Artist Residency.

Daniel Peltz

I think an Artist's Residency where the projects were … or there was an advanced dialogue, projects were …

Rosalind Nashashibi

When you say an artist's residency, do you mean several weeks?

Amanda Ravetz

No.

Rosalind Nashashibi

I couldn't conceive of an artist's residency of four days.

Daniel Peltz

Do you mean four days?

Amanda Ravetz

Rosalind do you mean it's too short?

Daniel Peltz

A residency is at least a month or two.

Rosalind Nashashibi

It's just in the terminology, it means that something might come out of it, so it's …

Jos van der Pol

Well, you could do three weeks.

Amanda Ravetz

The suggestion that came up in our group was three weeks. I thought that would be very expensive. Maybe we could approach an organisation that already does that kind of work and have it as an idea that they could take on.

Rosalind Nashashibi

We could do a second conference if you wanted over four days, I mean it's just a matter of terminology.

Amanda Ravetz

It's not just a matter of … we don't want to revisit things we've done already. Though if we want to then begin to show each other work, critique, find people you might want to work with, do that in a more open way? We've got this far, can we use it to move on - but what are the practicalities of that? … it needs to be three weeks maybe, so how do we think about getting the money for that?

Soumhya Venkatesan

Can you clarify the term residency for me? Is that inviting an artist to…

Erika Tan

There's so many different possibilities, what do you want to try and get out of it?

Soumhya Venkatesan

So different people might want different kinds of residencies, so if two people want to work together …

Rosalind Nashashibi

Do people here think they will have three weeks to do that, in the next year?

Bryony Bond

I think it's always nice when things evolve over a long period. How you organise that is really difficult, like when people meet up for two days then go away and then meet up for a really intense period. But that's not a residency that implies an actual kind of living.

Erika Tan

Maybe there's a whole series of different ways things can happen – it's about these particular people all meeting again.

Lesley Young

It could be The Salford Restoration Office inviting two people from this workshop and another person, you know, coming up with proposal as a format which has it uses within a context in the locality of Greater Manchester but also has a use within the community we have made here, the people sitting here. I misunderstood you Anna when you asked me did 'The Salford Restoration Office plan to work with anthropologists.' I felt put on the spot about that, because it wasn't necessarily in the plan, but as a way to continuing something that's been started it could be.

Daniel Peltz

The other way is thinking about that interim period between now and whatever it is that we do. Whether it's never or quite soon – as a period that we work with rather than a period when we reconvene. One thing I've been working with lately is durational responses and durational response structures. So, for example you have an oppressive regime and you set up a parallel structure that exists for the duration, plus one day, of the oppressive regime. And you set it up with whatever you have, chicken wire, whatever, and you set it up there, next to the Whitehouse. What would be most exciting would be if we could think of this not as how to continue this dialogue, but how the next step could be making a commitment to continuing this dialogue in some way with one of the participants. And then seeing what grows out of that. And then committing to a kind of reporting back to each other or something. And seeing what comes out of that in terms of what another structure could be.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Could that be a structure of emailing one other person and cc-ing a third so that person doesn't take part. So it becomes like a third, the threeing …

Daniel Peltz

Right. The Threeing Workshop lives on!

Bryony Bond

I'd just like to show some films at the museum, not making any distinction if it's made by an artist or an anthropologist. I'd just love to show those films as we saw them here, together, some really great works that have some really great ideas and when you see them together they lend each other ideas and I'd love to open that up in some way.

Rosalind Nashashibi

There's a lot more films that we all have access to. It would be nice in a way to have another session where we just show each other films.

Bryony Bond

Yeah, and I loved people's work and people also brought films that had influenced them. It's nice to see the film that had influenced you and then the work that you made - not as direct response. So I'd take that as a proposal to the Manchester Museum.

Anna Grimshaw

This is the sort of model? This is the workbook that … ?

Amanda Ravetz

I'd be interested in any other things that people have had from workshops about ways of working.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Are there other anthropology events like this going on?

Amanda Ravetz

Well I don't know of any.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Or not like this. Times and places where anthropologists meet?

Amanda Ravetz

There's the Royal Anthropological Institute film festival happening in Manchester in July. There will be other things.

Rosalind Nashashibi

But not things where people go and stay together and have ...?

Amanda Ravetz

I don't know. Does anybody know?

Anna Grimshaw

There used to be something that Dick Werbner organised that was always a weekend workshop around a theme.

Amanda Ravetz

There's Santa Fe.

Rosalind Nashashibi

See, I have an interest in exploring that a bit more filmically, so I'd like to know while you're all here where I should point myself.

Chris Wright

What about the School of American Research ones?

Amanda Ravetz

The one that Writing Culture came out of.

Lucien Taylor

They're organised, they are not by invitation. If you want to do something at that you can put together a proposal and you invite some people and you submit a proposal. And if they take it they fly you in from wherever and they do look after you while you're there. And when I've been you share work beforehand and it was actually a seminar on visual anthropology, but it was based on papers we'd written nonetheless in this case, and we'd all read each others work and each one was a discussant for someone else's and then there were a couple of interlocutors and the whole thing …

Rosalind Nashashibi

And what time of year was it?

Lucien Taylor

Anytime you want.

Soumhya Venkatesan

That's the thing, these things happen a lot, all the time, so you need to know anthropologists who are doing it.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Ahh, they're just happening at any point?

Soumhya Venkatesan

Exactly, they're just happening at specific points. So we had one in December. You organise your own.

Rosalind Nashashibi

You organise your own conference and submit it to a body who runs it and takes care of it?

Soumhya Venkatesan

So if you know anthropologists you can, there's nothing …

Rosalind Nashashibi

Well, I do now!

Soumhya Venkatesan

If you stay in touch and we're doing stuff then we can let you know.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Or we can put together a proposal even.

Amanda Ravetz

So you'd like to know about things that are residential particularly?

Rosalind Nashashibi

Or I could take a part in putting together something if somebody wants to do that.

Chris Wright

The other thing that is a funding stream is something called the Wenner Grenn foundation that fund - for anthropologists at least - something called 'a symposium'. Which again is something where you invite people where you all see each others work that you're going to talk about beforehand. But you just get to choose a nice place where you'd like to be for four or five days but it is four or five days. It's not two months.

Rosalind Nashashibi

It's not something that I would be able to commit to anyway in terms of months or weeks. Because I was here, I was really involved, and although I wanted to film, I realised that I couldn't do both, and now I would like to be able to …

Soumhya Venkatesan

One way to do it is to put together a proposal. Another way is to get people to let you know if they're doing something … but these things happen all the time.

Rosalind Nashashibi

I guess that could be an option for the group anyway despite what I'm trying to get out of it.

Amanda Ravetz

So it seems like there's lots of ideas and people will do those ideas if and when they want to. It would be nice if people let me know, so that if they felt any of those things had come out of this, I could have an awareness of how this went on into the world and what it became.

Lucien Taylor

I think maybe in a sense the art AND anthropology maybe its too big. Or maybe just because its two terms. The 'and', maybe the conjunction becomes a disjunction. I was thinking maybe if we were to go for a more limited theme. And there are any number of themes that are of interest, and maybe a happy theme that people have talked about already is 'The return of the real' in terms of art and different peoples relationships to the real and what they might mean by the real. And like in a couple of catalogues on the table here, both Rosalind and Paul distinguish themselves from ethnographic filmmakers' relationships to the real and different relationships to ritual and mythology in a certain sense, and for me that would be an incredibly constructive discussion. Different people's aesthetic responses to an engagement with reality and what we might mean by that.

Chris Wright

One of the kind of models that maybe you David can say something about, is if you go on a sound conference there are usually one or two sound walks involved which is where the organiser has just said "ok, there's this particular site where we are all going to go to and we are all going to write down our responses or in some way make a response to it", and it's not supposed to be stand alone bit of work but it gives you all a similar experience that you all have to respond to. And that seems like quite a nice model to do on other things as well as sound. The couple of sound walks I've been on, it's a very amazing thing. You don't have to think about which place you're going, it's like ok, we go here, I just want everybody to have this walk in silence, and everyone responds to it in some way.

Lucien Taylor

There are different forms of response or collaboration. You know paradoxically if it could be said that our group's piece had any virtue it was really due to Mary and Jos and Bryony, but definitely not me, and if I had to do a collaborative piece of work, then I can't really. I guess my next piece of work is so far off that I can't imagine collaborating with anybody, but my work will definitely be informed by the work I've seen here and the discussions I've had in ways that I don't even know yet, and there are different ways of feeding off each other I think, and there are so many other people as well who are interested and who aren't here who are engaged, who are invested in similar endeavours and dialogues.

Paul Rooney

For me it's similar, it's quite soon to talk about specific … potentially, yeah, actual collaborations are going to take place but it's … I'm in the midst of it at the minute and in the meantime I'm just going to absorb the experience I suppose.

Chris Wright

I mean the website thing is a particular issue, it also sounds like that, if it's an ongoing thing - I'm not sure how funding for that works, but if that's an ongoing thing it's also perhaps something that we can at times, that suit us to contribute things to it, or have as a discussion place or put pieces of work up. It would allow all of us to remain in touch outside of individual things. I know from my experience of the Tate Modern project Fieldworks, that that archive that happened three years ago people watch it all the time. So that is a resource and I don't know if the sound from this can be put on the website. That would make it very accessible to a whole range of students and all sorts of people.

Amanda Ravetz

The website could obviously be quite a big thing and take a long time to develop.

Anna Grimshaw

Again, you could start it small and keep adding.

Amanda Ravetz

The university said they'll maintain it to begin with. I don't know how much space that means there is or how they'll maintain it.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Plus, I mean, what structure would we use if one of us wanted to add something to it?

Bryony Bond

I've used this really interesting thing called Basecamp. I've used it on projects when I've been working with people in different locations, people sign in and there's lots of areas where you can upload files, and you can have a theme so you can upload something you'd found or a word document you've written. It's structured not quite like a website, and you can post up comments but it's a closed group, so we used it as a way to communicate between projects, but it could be a way to see what emerges from something.

Rosalind Nashashibi

That's something you can upload without being a web designer?

Bryony Bond

Yeah, I can use it.

JvDP It's like a hard disk online.

Amanda Ravetz

I suppose if it was a site that was publicly accessible I'd have to load stuff ...

Bryony Bond

It's a closed group.

Amanda Ravetz

It would have to be in addition. I made a commitment to the AHRC that it would be a public website

Bryony Bond

When you were thinking about how it might look. It's away that you can see what things are emerging so if people are uploading loads of files you have to think about that, or of people are posting comments on a certain area it reveals a shape.

Lesley Young

When Cornerhouse did a project with Clegg and Guttmann, we made a forum. I don't know if that works for images or sound or moving image.

Bryony Bond

I'll send you a link to one of the projects we did.

Amanda Ravetz

Reports, stuff to put on the website, whatever you have that you want to be part of this body of work, if you could get it to me somehow?

Lesley Young

What's your deadline on that Amanda?

Amanda Ravetz

I have to have something out within three months.

Anna Grimshaw

You could just start by putting stuff up now.

Lesley Young

Does within three weeks seem like a good time?

Bryony Bond

We could set up a Connectig Art and Anthropology Basecamp and everybody could see it?

Lucien Taylor

As long as we realise so much work isn't exhibitable on a website. It privileges some work above others that may have to be referred to.

Chris Wright

I'd been keen on this other stuff we talked about as a group.

Daniel Peltz

An enormous amount of valuable dialogue came out of all three group meetings and even if it wasn't publically accessible, as a way of our processing ... I don't know if you all did as much audio recording?

Amanda Ravetz

Ours failed.

Daniel Peltz

We don't know yet, but we think we recorded a lot of audio. If we uploaded it and made it more widely accessible? We had it running a lot I don't think it should be publicly accessible. We were playing a game so people are saying things that are not necessarily their words.

Amanda Ravetz

We might hear ourselves being talked about?

Lucien Taylor

It's the work that counts, and if it becomes programmatic or it becomes like an academic inter-discipline that people are colonising and disciplining and getting invested in for it's own sake then I think there's a danger and I really think it's the work that will shape whatever comes out in an important way. And will shape our understanding of what's happening.

Amanda Ravetz

My experience of working with the group was at the point when it went beyond, not necessarily the work, but 'are we the same, are we different', it resolved into something much more interesting.

Anna Grimshaw

Thank you very much Amanda for having us all and Lesley for all your work, you've really done a terrific job.

Lucien Taylor

And Daniel thank you for every thing you've done.