More recently, making sketches as visual field notes has been experiencing a kind of renaissance in fieldwork. Ethnologists such as Michael Taussig, Tim Ingold and Amanda Ravetz have rediscovered drawing and painting, not just as a method of recording or documenting ethnographic observations, but as a specific strategy and technique of visual research that emphasizes the processual nature of scientific work expanded the range of possibilities to include also dimensions of the imaginary, the dreamlike, the hallucinatory or the memory. The lecture discusses examples of visual field notes from early ethnology to the present and attempts to relate them to Mattia Denisse’s travel diaries and drawings.
Anja Dreschke is an ethnologist, filmmaker and curator and lives in Cologne. Her research interests and publications are in the field of audiovisual anthropology and media ethnology with a focus on the theory and practice of audiovisual media at the interface of experimental ethnography, essayistic film and artistic research. Most recently, together with Barbara von Flue, she has curated the exhibition “Michael Oppitz. Mobile Myths“ in the KOLUMBA Museum, Cologne (2018). With Regina Barunke she is currently preparing the exhibition “The Raw and the Cooked. Field Notes in Art and Anthropology “.
Lecture to the exhibition “Mattia Denisse. TRIPOD. The Anthropologist Monkey VS The Alcoholic Lizard”