[-empyre-] visualization between art and anthropology

[fiamma montezemolo]

Thank you for your question Christina.

Yes, I did work on the 'aftermaths' of the InSite project in the border
between Mexico and the USA. As an artist and anthropologist - using an
inter-medial methodology - I was particularly interested in making an
attempt to understand what is left after a biennial, a curatorial project,
an artist leaves a scene of intervention. InSite has been a very important
art initiative that lasted many years in the Tijuana-San Diego border. In
2005 they had their last intervention and moved later to Mexico City. In
2013-14 I made a video called Echo based on their archive and an
ethnography. By revisiting the scenes of these curatorial and artistic
interventions, “echo” emerged both as a concept and a practice that enabled
a reassembling of these art works, their futures,  beyond their expected
ruins and remains.

Each work/artist and afterlife/echo of those works  -after the artists
completed them and left to focus on another work - raised different and
enriching questions on social art, on ethics, on methods, on the people
involved in the projects, on the city itself and its urban cycle, on the
future of public sculpture, etc. The assemblage of archival images and
current reverberations, of all sort of data visualization through video,
text, voice over, drawings, interviews, of affects and representation has
been a real challenge in this work, as you mention: especially in terms of
methodology.

The result is that more questions were opened after the initial ones. The
conclusion was inconclusive: Narcissus (all of us working, representing,
intervening on the border: anthropologists, artists, curators, etc.) and
Echo (the context, the artists, the collaborators, the public sculptures,
the objects, etc.) are clearly part of the same scenario and they are both
plural and problematic in their own way...

In this sense, I am not sure mine was a 'feminist methodology', but maybe
yes a 'feminist sensibility', or as a long literature that started with
Adorno would define it: an 'unmethodical method', an undoing of
categorization, indeed a sort of ‘border crossing’.

Best,
Fiamma
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