Funding: German Research Foundation (DFG)
Project duration: June 20245 to May 2028
Directed by: Dr. Sophia Thubauville
Project collaborators: Igor Karim (PostDoc), Bersabel Mesfin (student assistant)
In the current decolonial and postcolonial debates within cultural heritage institutions, European archives are increasingly focusing on the restitution of films due to their extensive collections from the Global South (Sarr & Savoy 2019; Ohene-Asah 2022; Campanini, Cheeka & Hediger 2021). At the same time, scholars and artists are undertaking innovative interventions in film archives and employing practices such as found footage films, in which old film material is reassembled to create new narratives that question notions of authorship, origin and historical context (Fossati 2012; Groo 2012; Knopf 2018; Gaycken 2021). In art theory, there are numerous studies on the interaction between artworks and viewers, with socio-material approaches emphasising the reciprocal relationship between objects and the networks in which they exist (Gell 1998; Hennion 1989; DeNora 2000). In addition, ethnology has developed methods that incorporate indigenous concepts in a non-reductive and comparative manner and enable a reconceptualisation through indigenous metaphysical and ontological perspectives (Wagner 1975; Strathern 1988; Viveiros de Castro 2002; Holbraad & Pedersen 2017). Scholars recognise the epistemological and political implications of this methodology as a decolonial movement in ethnology.
The research project will explore the epistemological and ethnographic potential of found footage films in a transdisciplinary framework that combines film restitution, found footage film production and anthropological fieldwork. This opens up new epistemological perspectives for anthropological research with found footage films. Methodologically, the project is based on research in the archives of the Frobenius Institute and film analysis using computer-assisted methods. In addition, the researchers will conduct shared observation screenings of the film material with the indigenous communities to investigate film and media reception. The project focuses on the production of found footage films by indigenous filmmakers based on ethnographic film collections of the Frobenius Institute, which were shot between 1950 and 1974 in the Sidaama and Gedeo regions of Ethiopia. Through artist residencies, researchers and indigenous filmmakers will focus on the interplay between new ontologies and historical sources in order to question the primacy of the original ethnographic author/film as a source of knowledge and to examine memory construction based on archival material. By participating in these residencies, researchers will collect ethnographic data on the relationships mediated and embedded by found footage film production within indigenous communities.
