In-betweenness in moving images: six experimental tactics of video-ethnography to narrate South Asian immigrant girls’ subjectivities

ABSTRACT

After exploring the interactions between moving image-based art practices and anthropology in recent decades, and the permeable membranes in ethnographic research, we will describe six tactics of video-ethnography used to create experimental narratives with a group of South Asian immigrant girls. Positioned in feminist critical poststructuralism, postcolonial theory and film theory, the research gives visibility to how the participants construct their identities when attending secondary school in Catalonia. Learning from artists like Ursula Biemann and Trinh T. Minh-ha, we have experimented with visual modes of producing cultural knowledge, with the aim of narrating migrant subjectivities and difference through moving images. Specifically, we focus on the production of stories through video-ethnographic research, based on the contributions of Michel de Certeau, who describes tactics as mobile, situated and fluid. In the end, this video-ethnographic research has experimented with reflexivity, ‘facing’, re-framing, in-betweenness, the interval, and spectatorship as tactics of narrating ‘otherness’

KEYWORDS:

• Girls’ subjectivities
• migration
• experimental ethnography
• moving images
• secondary education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The research Gender and migration in the visual narratives of South Asian girls attending school in Catalonia was supported by AGAUR and Secretaria d’Immigració, Generalitat de Catalunya, ref. ARAFI1-00044. The research team consisted of 7 women researchers: Aida Sánchez de Serdio, Judit Vidiella, Alejandra Montané, Verónica Larrain, Amalia Creus, Joanna Empain and Montserrat Rifà-Valls (coord.).

2 The two video-ethnographies are available in the following links: https://vimeo.com/316450574 and https://vimeo.com/316448424 [introduce the password: ‘arafi’].

3 A welcoming classroom in Catalonia is the space to receive migrant students in order to integrate them in the ordinary classroom as soon as possible. Here, the students work intensively in a small group with the aim of learning communicative and linguistic competencies (Catalan and Spanish) from an intercultural education approach. The Sikh student didn’t belong to the welcoming classroom but it still was a place of reference to her. We did not observe the ordinary classroom, because we focused on student’s lives and experiences.

4 We decided do not reveal the names of the girls in the article, so they will remain anonymous as far as possible, despite some images clearly expose them to the audience and we got the formal consents.

5 There is an annual Conference on Critical Visualities at the University of Michigan, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona (MACBA) has also organised an international workshop based on this concept.

6 2Move. Video art migration curated by Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (2008). We wanted to trace the trajectories of success of South Asian girls like the routes of this multi-layered global sex trafficking map and http://zkm.de/en/media/video/remote-sensing. The exhibition incorporated other artworks such as Un trabajo limpio (2006–2007) by Cinema Suitcase/Bal and Ward, and Her city (2004) by Samira Jamouchi. For more information see: http://www.cinemasuitcase.org/Projects.html; http://www.miekebal.org.

7 In her autobiographical account, she reconstructs her political positions tackling the construction of identity, and specifically, she realised she had been silenced by a racist outburst, when they called her ‘Paki’ after her arrival in London.

8 Particularly, she interprets the acts of ‘facing’ in Célio Braga’s Dalice (2005–2006) and Melvin Moti’s Stories from Surinam (2002).

9 Bal mentions Levinas, ‘who complements Heidegger’s ethics of care’ by re-interpreting the spatial and temporal disposition of face-to-face; and Deleuze, ‘who considers the close-up not exactly of the face but as the face, a tool to stop time and extend duration’ (Bal 2008, 67).

10 Unfortunately, we only experimented with the collaborative editing in the research team, when we shared the data collected to create a common script for the analysis that included the topics emerging from the fieldwork. However, the collaborative filming and the process of reviewing with the participants produced valuable feedback about the visual narratives and confirmed the importance of providing new collaborative spaces (and technologies) for editing with participants in the future.

11 Trinh T. Mihn-ha’s website: http://trinhminh-ha.com. Books and films by Trinh T. Mihn-ha were made available to us thanks to the MACBA Study Centre.

12 This piece works like Entrevistándome con emigrantes (2002) by Daniel Lupion, where the immigrants ask the questions to the artist, who only edited them in a critical exercise.

13 Before starting the fieldwork, we edited a theoretical video-essay (Messy scripts on theory 2010) with our findings on the notions that we had discussed: voice (multiple), representation, subjectivity, heterogeneity, and difference/différance.