Research through a Camera Lens: A Rhizomatic Search for Lode’s Code

ABSTRACT

Every family culture is ruled by unspoken codes. Throughout the short film Lode’s Code, Marieke Vandecasteele (the first author) searches for these codes within her own family in a visual-ethnographic way. In traditional research, families with a family member with a disability are often pinned down to individual categories linked with linear explanations. Vandecasteele’s search for the code of her brother Lode and for her own position in the parental nest—with leaving home as a red thread—resulted in a hybrid animated documentary where subjective experiences prevail over the search for explanations. It shows how layered codes intra-act in the family machine and can (be) move(d). This paper focuses on the rhizomatic process of making the film. How were the keys to Vandecasteele’s family code shaped and what was the role of animation film as a medium? An in-depth discussion shows how poetic research of this kind offers opportunities within the interdisciplinary research domain of Disability Studies to let the complexity inherent to a family with a member with a disability emerge in all its richness and multilayeredness.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual-ethnography
• shortfilm
• poetic inquiry
• family machine
• Disability Studies
• rhizome
• multilayeredness

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Prof. Dr Rutten for his feedback on the draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Elisabeth De Schauwer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4030-8515

Geert Van Hove http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3266-0524

Notes

1 Link to the film Lode’s Code: https://vimeo.com/197209791 in Flemish, with English subtitles, 12 mins. To get access, please email [email protected]

2 Lode’s Code excerpt [05:53–07:01].