Photos from the Field. Thinking immigrants’ therapeutic itineraries through ethnography-based art

Abstract

Ethnography-based art practices are opening up alternative possibilities for doing fieldwork, by involving different senses and deploying assorted strategies and media through practices in which is used in both the acquisition and the transmission of ethnographic knowledge. In this photo essay we present “Woundscapes. Suffering, creativity and bare life”, an ethnography-based art exhibition collaboratively produced by 11 anthropologists and artists from different countries. Woundscapes reflects the viewpoints of the EBANOCollective setting out to claim the place of ‘art’ with fragments of ethnography, and the place of ethnography with ‘artistic’ objects, producing an interference in the established circuits of academia, and at the same time in those of contemporary art. The use of collaborative and participatory methods and art practices in the acquisition and diffusion of ethnographic knowledge reflects the dialogical and processual nature of ethnographic mutual understanding, and at the same time creates a dynamic interchange between memories, dreams, visions, emotions and anxieties, revealing aspects of social reality which remain invisible – if observed only through the lens of the social sciences – and mute – if recounted only in the pages of academic monographs.