MA sensory media projects
Recycling Memories
Running Time: 10 min
Pauline Dabrowski, 2010
Baye Fallism is a Senegalese sect of the Sufi branch of Islam. The Baye Falls of the Mermoz neighbourhood in Dakar make a living by selling the artefacts they make out of the raw materials or the used items they find around them. When you take a closer look at the way they live, you realise that this idea of recycling does not only apply to their art but also to the way they engage in life; icons go through several cycles of duplication, words through several cycles of repetition, actions through several cycles of reproduction, drawing a tangible link between past and present. This repetitive rhythmic pattern imprints not only the items of their material culture but also their very bodies, forming the rich sensuous archive of their collective cultural memory.
Take me to a place outside
Running Time: 6 min
Martha-Cecilia Dietrich, 2009
The film is the result of a collaborative media project with female offenders at HM Styal prison, UK. 8 women present and represent their imagined outside through visual and aural dimensions offering alternative ways for understanding their realities. Focussing on the imagination, shaped by the experienced presence and absence, this film is a sensory journey to worlds of desire, longing and relief.
Just Walking Through
Running Time: 8 min
Michael Atkins, 2007
Just Walking through is a reworking of Ethnographic material produced for my 2007 MA in visual anthropology. My thesis 'Objects that look' explored the use of a mile long stretch of canal in Manchester by men seeking anonymous sexual encounters. Despite police 'crackdowns' and the increasing availability of willing sexual partners online, the canal remains popular for this purpose. It falls between places that people walk and offers spaces where the sexual act can be concealled from uninvolved eyes. Eliciting such encounters is an art of insider bodily and architectural recognition, every movement, placement, used condom and architectural feature possess an alterior meaning for those involved. I wanted to show how darkness, obstruction, ambiguous physical performance and scene selection helped contain the sexual act.
During 6 months of fieldwork I employed a combination of participant observation, ethnographic voyeurism and online ethnography to gain an insight into this capricious and difficult to access activity. Sketch enabled me to place the witnessed body into photographs of places, avoiding the ethical, legal and practical complications of recording participants' identities during 'the act'.