Ethnographic: out of print and into the exhibition space = La imagen etnográfica: dentro y fuera del espacio expositivo
Elisa De Souza Martinez
2016
Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Serie VII, Historia del Arte
In La Triennale 2012 -Intense Proximité, curator Okwui Enwezor describes his activity as that of ethnographer, combining «images of reality and models of examining reality». Thus, he proposes a journey that starts with the exhibited works and goes beyond the field of art. Among them is a set of drawings and photographs produced by Claude Levi-Strauss in the course of fieldwork in Brazil in 1935. The displacement proposed by the ethnographer's photographs documents in ethnological
more »
... , direct one's gaze to distant lands, as well as ancient times. From the images, the ethnographer's presence relates to a book, Tristes Tropiques, in which displacement unfolds in references to his predecessor, Guido Boggiani, and his successor, Darcy Ribeiro. The duality of approximating-distancing, a central movement in curatorial discourse, opens a way to seeing the ethnographic image as framing both a subject and its viewer. Ribeiro. La dualidad proximidad-distanciamiento, un movimiento fundamental dentro de su discurso expositivo, conforma una nueva manera de ver la imagen etnográfica que es tanto un marco del propio tema como un marco del espectador. Palabras clave Imagen etnográfica; discurso de conservación; La Triennale 2012; transtextualidad. ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGE: IN AND OUT OF THE EXHIBITION SPACE 237 ESPACIO, TIEMPO Y FORMA SERIE VII · hISTORIA DEl ARTE (n. éPOCA) 4 · 2016 · 235-259 ISSn 1130-4715 · E-ISSn 2340-1478 UnED This perhaps, creates the anxiety of disturbing nearness, the intimacy of being under siege by outsiders whose values (including their symbolic and historical identities) are viewed to be at odds with the values of indigenes (including their symbolic and historical identities). Okwui Enwezor (2012 b, 22) THE IMAGE OF A GROUP of Indians cheerfully bathing in a river somewhere in the Americas may seem a glimpse of paradise. 2 No one knows what the vegetation was like in Eden, though it is presumed to have been plentiful and beautiful. To presume its beauty is to project onto the Edenic world a known typology, largely formed by the conviction that what is found in nature can be classified and become ordinary. Or that we only recognize the beauty of what we are familiar with. Diversity can be confronted in everyday life. But, how far can one move away from aesthetic biases? The ordinary and the extraordinary are ways of being, and the shifting of images between them builds a network of interactions. 3 Moreover, they are territories with blurred boundaries, whose characteristics are not pre-determined. Ordinary defines everything that belongs to a system of references whose complexity is so familiar that it goes unnoticed. The shifting of an ethnographic object, which moves between the space of scientific study and the space of display of aesthetic qualities, requires detachment, or recognition that it is an element of «alien inheritance». 4 A system of representation or exhibition is used to bring what is seen close to who sees it. Before an object of an ethnographic collection on display, one is confronted by the remnants of other «lives» to capture the expression of material reality of a culture (Ribeiro & Van Velthem, 1992, 103). The experience with the ethnographic object replaces another experience that is more complex and challenging: the direct confrontation with another world. Even though other senses, such as touch and smell, are mobilized in contact with exotic objects, the sense of sight and the way it organizes the information received predominates.
doi:10.5944/etfvii.4.2016.16064
fatcat:ifx5jxsyyrelbc6ekjthv3ncle