The use of visual and digital methods in an ethnographic research on depopulation

Abstract

The contribution I propose is a reflection that begins with ethnographic experience to frame the ways in which audiovisual representation becomes an integral part of research paths and a possibility to question ourselves about how vision is culturally elaborated. The research involves a dense reading regarding the ways in which demographic pressure, specifically depopulation in an area of Southern Italy, translates into forms of abandonment, projecting us onto a map of border places, into restless itineraries where it is possible to find spaces full of sense and significance, active spaces of local interpretation.

In this scenario - which serves as a background and a frame - the visual discourse can draw on the representations on which the narrations are made to filter, engraved in the countless small examples that speak of identities in continuous transformation, while attempting to examine the world of images and objects that, by moving from one order of meaning to another, constitute the dense weaves on which sight and hearing, life and representations rest.