Isomorphic Articulations: Notes from collaborative film-work in an Afghan-Danish Film Collective

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearchpeer-review

  • ARTlife Film Collective
The chapter is written in collaboration with the ARTlife Film Collective (Sama Sadat Ben Haddou, Nilab Totakhil, Asma Mohammedzai Safi, Mursal Khosrawi, Karen Waltorp) which grew out of the research project: 'ARTlife: Articulations of Life among Afghans in Denmark’ and its experiments with co-generating spaces of articulation beyond the verbal and that which can be grasped within conventional academic discourse.

The ARTlife Film Collective works with 'research-through-filmmaking', akin to 'research-through-design' approaches that acknowledge the interventional, and the researcher's entwinement with that which is researched. The chapter unpacks the notions of ’collaboration’ and 'workshop’ pivotal in this project and discusses how the circulation of images in social media concretely was part of the knowledge emerging between the members of collective. This is conceptualized as ’isomorphic articulations’: Gregory Bateson advocated remaining systematic and rigorous in working open-ended with no narrowly predefined goal, and Eduardo Kohn, inspired by Bateson, suggests an anthropological thinking that is isomorphic, that is, corresponding or similar in form and relations. The chapter unfolds moments in the Film Collectives process toward isomorphic articulations in/across registers and modalities, and finally it zooms in on how this process entails unlearning and relinquishing of control.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPeripheral Methodologies : Unlearning, Not-Knowing and Ethnographic Limits
EditorsFrancisco Martinez, Lili Di Puppo, Martin Demant Frederiksen
Place of PublicationLondon
PublisherRoutledge
Publication date28 Apr 2021
Chapter9
ISBN (Print)ISBN 9781350173071
Publication statusPublished - 28 Apr 2021
Externally publishedYes
SeriesAnthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Social Sciences - Isomorphic, Articulation, Visual anthropology, Collective, Peripheral, Greyness, Digital anthropology, Representation, Experimental ethnography, Poetry and Politics

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