Home movies in the context of art - the artist as (auto)ethnographer

Abstract

Home movies’ ambiguous definition and impossible categorisation alone point to their enigmatic role in visual culture. Artists lead the transition of home movies from private into public space. Their reuse, mostly as found footage, in the context of art, though, adds a unique layer of meaning that doesn’t exist in any other way, something that could be described as an involuntary (auto)ethnographic gesture. The “artless” everyday image opens up a non-articulable fragment which always questions itself (how we perceive) and which, thus, can display a collective memory (also, a minorities’ memory) more profound than the traditional history. In our case though, banality as minority. The power of experimental (auto)ethnographic expression is its capability to combine the subject and object of the gaze in one identity, the ethnographer and the Other in the artist. In today’s world, saturated with extensive self-produced imagery, people become their own ethnographers. Home movies can be seen at the roots of this notion of self-vision. This article connects their structural, semiotic, philosophical and ethnographic potentials in constructing new meanings through appropriation and explores how the artist as (auto)ethnographer can open new hybrid (hi)stories as the counter-narrative.

© 2021 by Bulzoni editore

ISBN: 978-88-6897-268-4

ISSN: 2038-5536

Index

Found Footage Experience. Pratiche del riuso cinematografico e forme del contemporaneo
a cura di Rossella Catanese e Giacomo Ravesi

Rossella Catanese, Giacomo Ravesi, Per un’estetica del found footage nelle pratiche del cinema contemporaneo
Giulia Simi, Con la memoria negli occhi: la vita ritrovata nell’opera di Jonas Mekas
Arianna Vergari, Frammenti urbani. La città-archivio nel found footage film
Maja Milic, Home Movies in the Context of Art. The Artist as (Auto)Ethnographer
Laurence Kent, Indigesture: Coping with Trauma in Found-Footage Experimental Cinema
Alberto Spadafora, Claire Pijman & Robby Müller: la dimensione del “given footage” nel riuso fotofilmico
Laura Busetta, «Ho contato nelle tue lettere 47 volte la parola pazienza»: found footage e spazio femminile in L’America me l’immaginavo
Davide Persico, L’archivio delle immagini perdute. Il found footage come riflessione radicale nel cinema di Leonardo Carrano
Marco Benoît Carbone, Popularising the “Folkloric”: Innsmouth and the Italian Polesine in Mocku-/Found Horror Films H. P. Lovecraft and Road to L.
Lucia Tralli, «I don’t want to tell you what you already know». Vidding as Grassroots Found Footage Practice: the Case of lim
Maria Teresa Soldani, Dan Graham, Mark Leckey e Jeremy Deller. Pratiche artistiche di riappropriazione tra punk, EDM e postmodernità
Vito Zagarrio, Found footage, metalinguaggio e autobiografia

Saggi
Lorenzo Denicolai, Elisa Farinacci, YouTube e TikTok: forme di racconto audiovisivo digitale
Giuseppe Gatti, Out of this world: promozione e cultura visuale dell’aperitivo italiano in America. I casi di Martini & Rossi e Campari

Recensioni
Lara Conte, Francesca Gallo (a cura di), Artiste italiane e immagini in movimento. Identità, sguardi, rappresentazioni, di Sandra Lischi
Kim Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, di Martina Maria Mele
Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images, di Angela Maiello
Roberto Calasso, Allucinazioni americane, di Pietro Masciullo