visual project

Welcome to the Soil Dreams. What does happen if you take topsoil off and leave the land for 7 years? Take a tour and see, how land dreams.

This visual project studies how an unfinished plan to turn an arable land into a golf club changed the landscape. We propose to look at how soil erosion manifests the intersections between global tourist industry, financial flows and developers’ dreams. 

The tour repeats the golf game pattern, we follow from one hole to another. The order of holes and short two-line technical descriptions are taken from an original presentation of the golf club in the web.

The first and main impression from the place is that it is silent, abandoned and empty. But the soil left uncovered does not stay unchanged. Hopes of people and dreams of soil create a special atmosphere, which is nothing about emptiness and void framed by the absence of capital and interest of investors. 

SOILDREAMS

Hurrah, we have a format. we are making a web-site. firstly, we will be able to integrate various media and make direct links to the original site of the project. secondly, we are going to explore the structure of a web-site as a space for neoliberal dreaming. And thirdly, we will be able to collaborate and work on site distantly.
So the main story is the golf game and movement from one link to another. we will be supplying each link with a small story about the changes that project brought to the life of local community. and at the same time collecting paradoxes that show how what can be seen as void is not a void at all.
The other important thing about the web-site is the possibility to update it and add content in the future. A film or a photo-essay won't have such capacities.
Every week-end I find something new about the golf-club. Today, for example, I heard about the plans to let the land to a catholic church with plans to establish a new catholic monastery in the village. Sounds phantasmagoric, and totally unpredictable to me. Seems like emptiness leads to unlimited creativity in claims making. 

work progress

we have written a story. this will be a story of soil. we still struggle with a choice of the final format - film or photo essay. the choice very much depends on technical support and time constraints. although film seems to me more concise, it is also has a certain problem - it is much more difficult to include various sorts of materials we have collected due both technical, and copyright issues. Film looks to me now as more autonomous project in which the author has to do more and create content. the more usual genre of essay seems to be more hybrid, open to incorporation of various things, including multimedia through references. this is because the reader seems to be a more active and unrestricted actor, in comparison to viewer of the film. the latter, especially if accompanied by other viewers (like during our screenings at class) is disciplined to watch the film from the beginning to end. but the reader can just scan through photos, or read some bits, choose to follow references or not. if i could i would have made this projects in a form of a video game :) so that the viewer would have been obliged to make decisions on what thread of the story she wanted to follow.
maybe we can think about the technical possibilities of this. but I doubt we can do it in such a short time. 

some photos from the field

photographer Svetlana Poleschuk

Multiple temporalities of film production

Work in progress

The project will be a result of patchwork. This will be a film, with a soundtrack that hides strong wind blows, with the insertions from an interview that we recorded in English about the history of the place. As simple as possible. And even this now seems to me a complicated task of cutting.

This will also be an attempt to turn my inability to fix the camera to the tripod into an artful gesture J

Now I see that to make a comfortable for the audience shooting and keep it on the level of observational cinema is actually a very difficult technical task for the cameraman.

But at the same time my poor skills help to decide what to include into 6-8 minute film from more than an hour of footage. We have something about 10 minutes altogether of a good material. And there are only 5 and a half minutes of interview.

But after I was comforted with this shortage, a new challenge came.

It turned out that this is actually a lot! It seems to me that at the time of cutting the timeline of the footage is multiplying. It is as if you are finding yourself suddenly in a different time scale. It is certainly a different temporality. On every minute of the final film you spend hours of your time. Finally, 7 minute film will be a condensed version of the time that equates to several days spent on its production. Interesting, that with ethnography it is the same. You spend a year in the field, to remember several hours of really important action, and then you spend years to write about these hours. You jump between these various temporalities.

project:
this weekend I investigated the situation around the golf-club project and found out that although it looks as if it is abandoned, it is not. The owners of the land had to sell it to another firm because of the credit which they could not pay back. But last week there was a meeting of the representatives of the project with the head of local administration. they showed a new version of the project. There are plans that by 2020 there will be a golf resort in the area.
So we witness how neoliberal projects are being frozen, but not abandoned. Dreams stay, and even develop, as the investors provide a new architectural project of the club. And simultaneously, these dreams prevent the re-cultivation of the territory and actually contribute to conservation. The building of the TS (kolkhoz) situated on the lands sold for the golf project stay there with all the furniture and infrastructures untouched. The territory is closed and nobody still anything from the place. it can be seen as a historical artefact of the gone era, and neoliberal dreaming is contributing to this preservation. I plan to study this paradox by contrasting the images from the project portfolio and images of the real state of the lands.
but i do not want to create a binary opposition, instead to see how dreams and material object coevolve with each other. What is in the golf-projects images taken from "reality" and what role does this play there? And how do dreams shape the real things we witness?

The film Forest of Bliss to me looked very professional. I wonder how this effect is created. Is it just a result of a multiplicity of various perspectives, from which we see the scenes, as if there are many cameras working in the field? Or is it because there are no interactions between the cameraman and the subjects? Or is it because aesthetics seem to be more prominent than other topics, such as a narrative about particular event or a ritual?

Does this effect or image of visual professionalism changes in time? For example, various digital special effects are now almost inevitable part of professional films produced by the industry. Does it mean that in some time ethnographic films will need to use same effects or animation to look updated and professional themselves?

Even ethnographers are doing their film for the audience, and this means that if audience is changing, getting accustomed to particular visual standards, than ethnographic films have to absorb these standards. For example, many contemporary ethnographic films use short cuts, with fast changing images, so to look familiar to the audience trained to watch advertising clips and action films.

The debate around the Forest of Bliss seems to be preoccupied with the autonomy of anthropology from the surrounding environments, including film industry. Such autonomy seems to me impossible, and that is why I am not worried about the penetration of new visual technics.  I am worried about the demand for professionalization that such absence of autonomy creates. We cannot pretend that our amateurish film-making is enough for the purposes of the anthropological discipline. We have to develop professionally looking films, otherwise nobody will watch them. Does that mean that we have to work in collaboration with professional film makers? How can we integrate such collaborations with our fieldworks and difficult ethical problems connected with them? 

Thoughts about the possible visual project

I want to do a photographic essay, but the one that would combine visual images produced by people and those taken by my collaborator and me. There is a web that represents the project of a golf-club, intended to be built in the vicinity of one Hungarian village. The project started before the Global Financial crisis in 2008 and after the bankruptcy left the unfinished landscape of the golf club. The territory is fenced and abandoned. The web site shows photos of the construction as evidence of the potential of the project to attract investments and sell apartments that were planned to build nearby. Through reconstructing the photographic process by trying to produce photos that would be a double to the authentic initial ones we do not only create the classical pair of before and after, but also would analyze how project presentation is built up, and what constitutes the world of dreaming about neoliberal projects, such as international golf-clubs in Hungarian countryside. 

Bad Photos, Moments of Resistance

During our fieldwork among Evenki we had an interesting problem. There were moments that we desperately wanted to document and make a photo, because we knew in advance that we will write something about them and it would be nice to have a picture to put into text as illustration. But we constantly failed to make such pictures. For example, every morning in the Evenki camp started with sprinkling fresh tea into the fire. I planned to make a picture of this everyday ceremony for almost a month, and although I got the opportunity to make it every day, I never managed. Somehow, this simple act was to such an extent part of awakening process of the whole family including us that I was never prepared to use a camera. I lived in a same rhythm with other members and never could step outside this flow to document it. I always remembered about the camera, when the ceremony was already in progress. It was systematically unremarkable event, routine and not pompous at all. Finally, once the same ritual was conducted for other purposes and in other time. But now this was not about starting a day, the same sequence of actions was conducted before sending hunters on their trip. So although, actions were the same but surrounding elements differed, the context was different. The light was bright and the contrast of the picture was harsh. No any trait of those mystic twilights in which this was usually done in the morning. There was snow melting on the stove, when usually there is a pot there in the morning. It was already warm, and you cannot see the stiff figure of the praying woman. From this photo you do not have the impression of how cold it is in the morning, how anticipated is this fresh warm tea is. So on a close inspection, although this photo provides all the formal resemblance with what I intended to document, it showed a totally different mood. And was a bad photo, a wrong one. Perhaps, sometimes we need to accept that some moments are impossible to make a photo about. ‘Reality’ shows its resistance.

caricatures in anthropology

Adam Reed used caricatures specially produced for his book Papua New Guinea's Last Place as illustrations, instead of photos. I find that sometimes they captured the message better than any photo could probably do. They are provocative and humorous. I suspect you nave less nominal ethical issues by using caricatures instead of real photo images. This is like pencil drawings from courts. And to some extent caricatures are more honest, they do not pretend that they show something totally authentic and real. So I like it. The only problem is that I can't draw :(

in winter all your photos are black-and-white, sometimes with an additional sepia effect :)

aesthetics embedded in technology

An important problem was raised in both Edwards’ and Sontag’s papers: the challenge that photographing poses for the researcher, notably its aesthetics. Photograph is a result of selection (we decide when we make a shot, what we put into focus and which photographs we include in the final publication). But how we do these choices is very often almost impossible to recognize, because it is vey difficult to treat photos as something else than pictures. Photos seduce us to make them beautiful. I think that Sontag makes a masterful critical argument about the way Nazi images become associated with pornography, but it is not only the content (repressed desires) that makes this association possible, the technology itself is not free of pornographic associations. The photographer is looking into the world through a photo camera, as if through a keyhole, and this turns the world into a closed private bedroom. Those that we look at do not know how many people will finally see them documented in this one particular moment. Photograph is always a form of intrusion, no matter how accustomed we are to this intrusion both as cameramen and models. In this respect, photographing itself is driven by a desire: desire to see and then to share the image and to show. We are also aware of the fact that we will be judged by the audience: our skill, taste and luck will be evaluated by those who will see our photos. Anthropologists are not free from this context when they do their photos. It seems to me that the attempt to produce provocative or realistic photos as described by Edwards, are two strategies to deal with this context. Realist photos are produced with a pretension that images are documents of something that exists independent of the photographer. The provocative photos are the products of the conscious play with the limits of aesthetics. 

I have not yet formulated, what exactly I want to do for the final project, but I think that I would like to understand how the realistic stance works. And my question is also how our models and informants contribute to the production of realistic photos.