Multimodal ethnographies as practices of visiting

I first want to play the short film and then create some context by giving insights into production but also talk a bit about the idea behind all of it.

Intro/Context

In my short piece I wanted to recreate the experiences I made while engaging with a specific site in my neighbourhood as well as attempt to capture the thoughts and ideas that arose in working through the theories and approaches of multimodal more-than-human anthropology.

[Image of beaver dam]

What first caught my attention was the occurence of a disturbance of the as-usual. A beaver family has made a rather short, but renaturalized, piece of a local waterstream their home. Being fascinated by contemporary beyond-human literature at first I over-theorized this occurance. I was excited that beavers build their own infrastructure, a dam not unlike a human-made dam, similar but different. In the process of multimodal research of the beaver family, their infrastructure, and most importantly, the site of all of this itself, my perception and my focus of interests shifted.

In my engangement, not only with the course-material, but also with the popular point of view on the beaver, I had to realize that I too, frame the beaver through their industrial capabilities. I didn’t see the beavers, literaly, I saw only their dams.

Specifics

[Map of the place]

I walk this short stretch of waterway quite regularly, sometimes several times a week. I went to produce fieldrecordings there six times, audio and video. I honestly wasn’t quite sure what I intended with the recordings. Following Hanna’s advice, I had a rough question in place: How do the two dam’s interact with each other and their respective environments. Those two infrastructures then became my focii in the initial sessions. But I didn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere with my process.

[nice photo of traces of beaver]

What was much more important for me was being present. The recording-sessions became exercises in observation. Especially the audio-recordings were influencal on my perception and getting to know the place. It became very clear to me, that I wanted to build my piece around the audio-recording of a walk from one dam to the other. That choice gave a lot of form to the rest that followed. I then wanted to structure visual material around three or four of the “main” sites of the short walk.

[Map of the place; with main sites circled]

The problem is a bit that I have much more impressions in my head than on camera or my audiorecorded, material that I couldn’t express. I’m also not sure if more recordings would solve that problem. The application of collage is an attempt to deal with the semi-structured material I have in me. Flashes of views and sounds, layered on top of each other, weaved into situations.

I also took Michaela’s advice to heart and tried to build little dams into my Premiere timeline ;)

[Screenshot of Premiere]

Beavers and visiting as a gesture

Beavers not endangered anymore, and their population is luckily growing. There are an estimated 3000 individuals living in Switzerland at this moment. Despite their small numbers, their environmental impact is large and swift, changing landscapes within weeks. This process is directly perceivable by us. Beaver dams are unlike hyperobjects. And yet still, they raise questions and challenges for which we are not prepared. The only language we find is quantifying the costs and benefits.

[Image of algae with Statistics Emoji overlayed]

I felt the need to find gentler ways of framing our relationship with the more-than-human. I wanted to avoid seeing the beavers through statistical measures or their seemingly industrial practices. Instead, I wanted to take the beavers dam as an invitation to visit a complex multi-species situation. I guess one of the hallmarks of the anthropocene is, that we humans stopped being guests on this planet. We’ve became the main hosts, and honestly, we’re terrible at it.

[Complete quote; read it aloud]

And this is pretty much the moment when I remembered a favourite of mine. Donna Haraway, in describing Vinciane Despret’s practice in Staying with the Trouble, uses Hanna Arendts words to talk of the arts of visiting. She also talks of how one needs to be genuinly curious in order to properly visit. I found that fitting. Not necessarily as an outcome, but as an approach to inquire this site I chose. Maybe also as an approach to practice being a guest? At least I wanted to somehow express that in my piece.

[Another nice photo of the walk]

Feedback

In the comming few weeks I plan to work on the quality of the piece. Maybe some of the shots can be improved by color-grading. I also plan to produce some more recordings, video and audio. I’d love to capture some life and interactions and weave that into the piece.

In this course I got to know multimodal pieces as quite fuzzy regarding the transfer of knowledge. Especially soundwalks suffer clarity when no context is provided. My wish was simply to work on the idea of visiting multi-species situations through multi-modal ethnographies as a epistemological gesture. I’d love to hear from you, where and how the piece could be improved in order to advance this idea.

[Question for feedback]