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

Associate Professor Karen Waltorp has contributed to the book Peripheral Methodologies Unlearning, Not-knowing and Ethnographic Limits edited by Francisco Martinéz, Lili Di Puppo and Martin Demant Frederiksen, with the chapter ‘Isomorphic articulations: Notes from collaborative film-work in an Afghan-Danish Film Collective’. The book is part of the series Anthropological Studies of Creativity and Perception, series editor is Tim Ingold, published by Routledge.

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.

Find more information on the publication at: www.routledge.com and on Lili Di Puppo - Facebook announcement.