In August 2015 the municipality of Sinj, located in the Dalmatian hinterland, celebrated the 300-year anniversary of a historic victory against the troops of the Ottoman Empire, one that is ...legendarily attributed to the divine intervention of the Virgin Mary. The Sinj Tourist Board launched an unprecedented campaign in organizing and advertising the various events - ranging from historical re-enactments, film and music productions, folkloristic performances, sports events, exhibitions, and fashion shows, to religious processions and conferences. Using a variety of media formats, these efforts were aimed at creating a new national epic, expanding the meaning of the miraculous battle of 1715 from a local narrative to a nation-wide symbol, representing Croatia in a European and global context. This article focuses on various theatrical re-enactments of the historic battle and the alleged Marian apparition, assessing the role of nostalgia and authenticity in contemporary living history performances. While one of the underlying motifs in the case of Sinj is to enhance the region’s attraction as a tourist destination, the article also theorizes the re-enactment’s epistemological and political claims by proposing that these interactive engagements with history take an active stance in promoting and/or re-inventing heroic olden times to advance socio-political conditions in the present (Gegenwartsbewaltigung).
States of trance and spirit possession have inspired the modernist imagination perhaps more than anything else, as they typically exceed the limits of visual representation. This article investigates ...different approaches to coping with these challenges, focusing on the works of a group of Italian documentary filmmakers, including Luigi di Gianni, Cecilia Mangini, and Gianfranco Mingozzi, who used a novel set of audiovisual techniques to explore ecstatic religious expressions in southern Italy in the postwar years. I look into the processes through which trance and possession rituals (e.g. Apulian tarantism) themselves have inspired and initiated innovations in audiovisual documentation by means of combining-or blurring the boundaries between-ethnographic and experimental modes of cinematic practice. Through highly stylized image/sound compositions including high-contrast lighting, wood-cut like silhouettes, montage, abstract sound effects and poetic, partly fictionalized commentary, as well as by consciously making use of re-enactments and staged encounters, these films contest both the realist-observational narrative and the focus on individuals otherwise prevalent in ethnographic filmmaking. Reading the Italian films against the backdrop of the earlier and contemporaneous, yet much better-known trance films of Maya Deren and Jean Rouch, the article argues that their antirealist audiovisual aesthetic fabricates a social aesthetic that raises sensitivity to human experience and fosters a radically humanist stance.
Mythologies and narratives of victimization pervade contemporary Croatia, set against the backdrop of militarized notions of masculinity and the political mobilization of religion and nationhood. ...Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Dalmatia in the Croatian-Bosnian border region, this book provides a unique account of the politics of ambiguous Europeanness from the perspective of those living at Europe's margins. Examining phenomena such as Marian apparitions, a historic knights tournament, the symbolic re-signification of a massacre site, and the desolate social situation of Croatian war veterans,Narrating Victimhoodtraces the complex mechanisms of political radicalization in a post-war scenario. This book provides a new perspective for understanding the ongoing processes of transformation in Southeastern Europe and the Balkans.
Studies in the Arts Thomas Gartmann, Michaela Schäuble / Thomas Gartmann, Michaela Schäuble
2021, 202103, Letnik:
195
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Dass Künstler*innen forschen, ist nichts Neues. Was sich aber sukzessive wandelt, ist der künstlerische Zugang: Die Kunst ist nicht länger (nur) Gegenstand, sondern vor allem auch Mittel zur ...Erkenntnisgewinnung. Dieser Entwicklung folgend hat die Universität Bern gemeinsam mit der Hochschule der Künste Bern das erste Schweizerische Doktoratsprogramm für Künstler*innen und Gestalter*innen gegründet: Studies in the Arts (SINTA). Die an diesem Projekt beteiligten Beiträger*innen des Bandes liefern hierzu grundsätzliche Erwägungen und Fallbeispiele sowie praktische Anwendungen in Interpretation, Musikrezeption und Design.
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork (2004––2005), this article conceptualizes a topography of the Dalmatian-Bosnian border region as a memorial and sacralized landscape. Focusing on how ...inhabitants on the Croatian side of the border perceive their surroundings in terms of genealogies and territory, I trace the construction of geographical and historical landscapes in a context of ritual commemoration of massacre victims, examining ways in which local people's memory is literally inscribed in the landscape, in particular in relation to massacre sites and mass graves——from different epochs and conflicts——that had previously been concealed under Tito's regime. Investigating long-neglected spatial aspects of the political in the region, my contention is that landscapes constitute mnemonic agents and sites of historic revisions.
Funerary lament and ritual weeping are multi-sensorial public expressions of grief that are often referred to as examples of cultural continuity in and across the Mediterranean. In the 1950s, ...anthropologist Ernesto de Martino and his team assembled a unique set of photos and sound and film recordings on lament in Southern Italy in an attempt to verify that contemporary forms of mourning did not just resemble ancient funerary laments but were actual relics thereof. Departing from these audio-visual materials, this essay traces recurring patterns and sequences of images and sounds related to lament in Southern Italy, arguing that the (female) body of the performers becomes the main medium of iconographic and choreographic reproduction by way of re-enacting and imitating lament in staged settings. Rather than studying the phenomenon of lament in itself (or its decline) or commenting on the continuity thesis, I focus on the mediatised transmission of corporeal expressions of lamenters by drawing on Aby Warburg's concept of the "migration of images" (Bilderwanderung). I include artistic approaches and modes such as re-enactment, performance, and montage in my ethnographic study of ritual mourning and show that there is a repertory of ecstatic gestures transferred through command performances that is not concerned with "authentic" documentation. Instead, these gestures are there to be performed, individually reappropriated, and revived in situations of crisis to the present day.
Are there ethnographic approaches that are particularly suited to elicit and communicate unarticulated experiences and concealed understandings of the world? What methods and media techniques would ...be most appropriate to unearth or mine such realms? Which aesthetic practices are aimed at the description or mimetic replication, and which ones at the construction or creation of (a new) reality or experience? This special issue is the result of conversations initiated around these questions on ...
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