How can today’s anthropologists, artists, curators, performers, and storytellers of other sorts sit in the intersections and disjunctures of their various fields, and make sense of shared desires for non-extractive, non-exploitative storytelling? This project and the courses and work that take place within its auspices are one mode into asking these questions. While we may not come to any answers, this collective exploration of anthropology and its intersections with the arts and forms of public culture seeks to center these questions and develop a collective and collaborative praxis.
This project emerges from a course offered at Wesleyan University in the Department of Anthropology by Professor A. George Bajalia. The student work showcased here comes out of the course “Performing and Producing Anthropology” taught by Bajalia. This works sits alongside, potentially in dialogue with, the Youmein Festival, a contemporary art and performance festival founded by Bajalia in Tangier, Morocco with Zakaria Alilech and Tom Casserly. This project, as well as the festival, emerge from a belief that anthropological knowledge production need not be siloed into academic formality and guarded into obsolescence, but rather can be engaged with and taking cues from other critically engaged thinkers and practitioners in the field of the arts and curation. Given Anthropology’s intertwining with colonial and imperial violence and extraction, this project takes as its starting point a non-extractive practice.
You can find out more about this project by contacting Bajalia at abajalia[at]wesleyan.edu and by visiting the project page, https://intersections.wescreates.wesleyan.edu/.