Skilled Vision: The Homeless City—Behind the Making of an Ethnographic Documentary

Abstract

Here we look at the process behind the making of the film Very Very Different. It was created in the city of Bari (southern Italy) by five homeless people who joined in its production and took part in the storytelling workshops organized by INUIT. These aimed at letting participants bring their own stories and share them gradually, fostering familiarity with audiovisual language in order to merge their specific inclinations with the production of a participatory film. Each session was presented as a moment of mutual learning. From the writing of the screenplay to the shooting and editing of the video itself, participation was the conditio sine qua non for the mutual exchange of knowledge: the technical knowledge of field experts and the local knowledge brought along by the homeless group.

The five authors chose a common subject and started the discussion from a news report. Then they inflected it according to the priorities of their personal narrations. Each video shows the city from the street’s point of view and it carries values, imageries and significance to the spatial boundaries. The film exhibits altogether several perspectives and tries to negotiate them: the use of visual means and the concept of authorial commitment, the ethnographic encounter and the weight of relations between researchers and informants, the spatial sense and the construction of personal visualscapes.

Notes

As Malkki [1997] shows, two naturalisms must be challenged. The first is the ethnological habit of taking association of a culturally unitary group (the “tribe ” or “people”) and “its” territory to be natural; the second is the national habit of taking association of citizens of states and their territories to be natural. Both the ethnic and the national naturalism present associations of people and place as solid. According to Gupta and Ferguson [1997], we must move beyond naturalized conceptions of difference within common, shared and connected spaces.

We have decided to use the real names of participants.

Reflexivity here does not mean a private act or a mere exercise of consciousness [Strathern 1987], but instead an exercise of continual self-contextualization, of negotiation of one’s position, in order to interpret the logics underlying the contexts and the conditions in which one works. As Susan Wright puts it: “It was this kind of ‘political reflexivity’ that I sought to engender in my students. By this I mean an ability to analyse daily encounters, their reactions to them, and signs of how other actors seemed to expect them to act, in order to uncover the detailed ways in which boundaries, hierarchies and power relations operated in the institution in which their learning was taking place. I aimed for them to perceive how they were positioned within the daily processes of this institution, and for them to be able to use this knowledge actively: if this positioning was constraining their ability to learn, how could they use their knowledge to negotiate a more conducive environment?” [2004: 40].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angelo Romano

ANGELO ROMANO is an urban anthropologist. After his Ph.D. he created Anthropolis, a research team of urban anthropologists located in Rome, and published several essays on senses of place, urban growth and interdisciplinarity in urban studies.

Simone Hardin

SIMONE HARDIN is a photographer and filmmaker, who co-founded Inuit [www.progettoinuit.it], a team of filmmakers involved in participative audiovisual productions and projects of social inclusion through the visual arts. E-mail: [email protected]