Ethnographic Terminalia (2009-P)
Ethnographic Terminalia
2009-present [Philadelphia 2009; New Orleans 2010; Montreal 2011]
Montréal, 2011: field, studio, lab
“We seek projects in any medium for inclusion in Ethnographic Terminalia 2011 that take up the theme: field, studio, lab. These three locations–the field, the studio, the lab–comprise both their own communities of practice, and form sites of inquiry and production for artists and anthropologists. Field, studio, and lab are not only places where knowledge is produced, or ethnographic data gathered, but are spaces of everyday life and local cultural production; they are generative sites of encounter, negotiation, conflict, celebration, failure, disappointment and revelation-all of which can unsettle (or ossify) discursive, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries.”
2011 Principal Curators:
Kate Hennessy, School of Interactive Arts + Technology (SIAT), SFU (Vancouver, Canada
Fiona McDonald, University College London (London, England)
Trudi Lynn Smith, York University, (Toronto, Canada)
Co-curators:
Craig Campbell, University of Texas at Austin (Austin, USA)
Stephanie Takaragawa, Chapman University (Orange, USA)
Maria Brodine, Columbia University (New York, USA)
“No longer content to theorize the ends of the discipline and possibilities of new media, new locations, or new methods of asking old questions, those associated with Ethnographic Terminalia are working in capacity to develop generative ethnographies that do not subordinate the sensorium to the expository and theoretical text or monograph.
Ethnographic Terminalia is an initiative designed to celebrate borders without necessarily exalting them. It is meant to be a playful engagement with reflexivity and positionality; it seeks to ask what lies beyond and what lies within disciplinary territories. As an initiative to bring contemporary art practices in closer proximity to forms of anthropological inquiry, Ethnographic Terminalia is primarily concerned with creating opportunities for the exhibition of non-traditional projects. The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the border; of course the terminus is also a beginning as well as its own place, its own site of experience and encounter” (http://ethnographicterminalia.org).