Nora Wuttke's Hospital Echoes Installation, Lady David Gallery, SOAS, University of London (13 April–2 May 2023
Echoes are rebounding sound waves that bounce off surfaces, creating a lingering presence in space. Experiences also echo through time, with memories, feelings and poignant words reverberating in our minds long after an event has passed. Analysing fieldwork involves listening to echoes. Anthropologists look for the repetitions, feel for patterns, to see what resonates the loudest. In Hospital Echoes, Nora Wuttke's fieldwork sketches are projected out of the notebook into near-life-size renderings. The echoing of hand-drawn images through digital and physical spaces becomes a tool of analysis. A trained architect, Wuttke had already spent three years working on the rejuvenation of the Yangon General Hospital before she returned as an anthropologist. Filling eleven sketchbooks with drawings of the daily rhythms and infrastructures of the hospital reframed her perspective towards the ethnographic, and allowed her to attune to the spaces and relationships in between human and non-human actors (Wuttke 2020).
The resulting installation is architectural, with narrow corridors of floor-to-ceiling sheets inviting exploration. The painted figures respond to the movement of visitors in the space, physically resonating with the audience. The swaying sheets give a sense of people carefully moving out of the way of each other in busy hospital thoroughfares. Images of care resonate through time and space, recalling Jason Danely's (2023) work Fragile Resonance, in which he conducts a cross-cultural ethnography of caring in Japan and England. In this work, instead of identifying patterns, Danely discerns multiple kinds of resonance in stories of care. Carers are shown to empathetically resonate with the people in their care, sometimes dangerously so. In a similar way, the installation is a space for resonance, for visitors to attune to moments of care while maintaining their separateness. The images connect visitors with experiences that resist articulation (Crapanzano 2004: 18), with little accompanying information.
I had first met Wuttke in 2020 through her submission for Illustrating Anthropology (Haapio-Kirk 2022), an exhibition I co-curated that featured sixty-two works of graphic ethnography from around the world. During the Hospital Echoes exhibition, I invited her to do a takeover of the Illustrating Anthropology Instagram account. Through nine posts, she shared the narratives behind her drawings, presenting observations from fieldwork and reflections on what drawing ‘did’ for her research. This digital echo of the exhibition made it accessible to those who could not attend in person, but it also added layers of narrative to the drawings on display, somewhat fixing their meaning. The physical exhibition resonated with the bodies of visitors for a limited time. The digital exhibition remains, echoing in virtual space in perpetuity, inviting new connections. In my graphic response to the installation presented here, my intention was to convey the embodied experience of moving through the exhibition space, both offline and online. We see how the line between the two is blurred, as the narrative insights gained online play over the images. Conversely, online I am able to dwell longer with the images, taking my time to look closely and zooming into the frame beyond the textual narratives.
Throughout the Instagram takeover, on her own account, Wuttke shared posts about the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. Her links to articles drew vital awareness to the deteriorating human rights situation there. In the rabbit-hole nature of online navigation, a visitor might find their way from hand-drawn sketches of Yangon General Hospital to photographic coverage of atrocities happening in the region. The focus on individuals and relationships of care in Wuttke's drawings offer a moment of pause and connection in a world of fast-moving images. Digital photography now permeates our lives, and it is in this context that hand-drawn images become especially meaningful. The same might be said for anthropology. Lisa Stevenson contends that anthropological theorising ‘relies on images or pictures of lived experience’, for example in written vignettes or in actual images, yet the imagistic nature of the discipline remains under-theorised (2022: xi). The graphic turn in anthropology, reflected in Hospital Echoes and in the wide-ranging approaches exhibited in Illustrating Anthropology, holds the promise of analytical gifts that might resonate with the discipline as a whole.
Acknowledgement
Text, photo collage and illustrations by Laura Haapio-Kirk
Photos by Nora Wuttke
Laura Haapio-Kirk
Christ Church, University of Oxford laura.haapio-kirk@chch.ox.ac.uk
References
Crapanzano, V. 2004. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Danely, J. 2023. “Introduction.” In Fragile Resonance: Caring for Older Family Members in Japan and England. Online ed. Cornell Scholarship Online, 18 May. https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501765643.003.0001.
Haapio-Kirk, L. 2022. ‘Illustrating Anthropology’. Theorizing the Contemporary, 28 July. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/laura-haapio-kirk.
Stevenson, L. 2022. ‘Forward’. In C. Mattingly and L. Grøn (eds), Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Precarious World. New York: Fordham University Press, vii–xiv.
Wuttke, N. 2020. ‘Infrastructure, Maintenance, and Waste in a Myanmar Hospital’. Somatosphere. https://somatosphere.com/2020/infrastructure-maintenance-waste-myanmar-hospital.html/
Moreshin Allahyari, dir. 2020. She Who Knows the Unknown: Kabous, the Right Witness and the Left Witness. Virtual Reality/Digital.
Nazlı Dinçel, dir. 2019. Instructions on How to Make a Film. 16 mm.
What makes a project feminist, and what constitutes a reviewable anthropological media project? Here, I reflect on two innovative film and media projects that I took part in programming for the Virtual Otherwise Conference and Film Festival, a biannual event co-sponsored by the Society of Visual Anthropology and the Society of Cultural Anthropology. The festival section, titled ‘Feminist Storytelling: Engaging the Future through the Past’, featured the films that are the subject of this review, and it is my sense that these represent two different approaches to contemporary feminist filmmaking. Moreshin Allahyari's film (she/her), She Who Knows the Unknown: Kabous, the Right Witness and the Left Witness (2020), is a virtual reality (VR) installation adapted into a twelve-minute film for viewing in cinemas and on laptops. Nazlı Dinçel's project (they/them), Instructions on How to Make a Film (2018), by contrast, is created on 16 mm film.
Allahyari's film takes place in Kermanshah, Iran, during the country's eight-year war with Iraq. As the audience moves through a dark and tranquil hammam, they are introduced to jinn (mythical spirits, often inhabiting sacred sites) floating overhead. Whereas jinn in present-day Iran are predominately described as male beings, Allahyari depicts monstrous, powerful female and agender figures. She refers to this as a ficto-feminist and activist practice of refiguring, a method in which she revives and sometimes reimagines suppressed and forgotten stories of the past.
As the film moves through the hammam, a childlike voice recites:
This refrain evokes current debates amongst women in Iran, who increasingly resist social pressure to bear children. Simultaneously, the audience's attention is drawn to contemporary conversations amongst scholars, artists and activists about inter-generational trauma and healing, such as in the wake of colonial and structural violence (Sangalang and Vang 2017; Smith 2016), or artist-activist work like Guadalupe Maravilla's (2021) healing through sound. Allahyari uses new technologies to renew long-established storytelling practices through her depiction of jinn. She grapples with feminist futures – like child-bearing and inter-generational trauma for Iranian women – by reimagining powerful mythical figures of the past.
By contrast, Dinçel uses residual technologies of analogue filmmaking to perform a multi-vocal feminist futurity. Their eight-minute-long 16 mm film is playfully titled Instructions on How to Make a Film. The project provides step-by-step instructions on how to create an analogue film in the digital age. ‘Step one’, the author's voice instructs, ‘get a camera . . . read the manual’.
Midway through the film, in a grassy field, a close-up scene of fellatio begins, first to the tune of the filmmaker's humming Madonna's ‘Like a Prayer’ and then to the slow narration of a performance theory:
Self-representation is representation nonetheless. Whether the representation essentializes . . . or totalizes . . . the ethnographic fragment returns with all the problems of capturing, inferring, constituting and presenting the whole through parts. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 55)
You can detach artifacts from their makers, but not performances from performers. True, artifacts can be photographed and performances can be recorded. But artifacts are not photographs, and performances are not recordings. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 62)
This moment can be understood as an intervention into how women have historically been represented as passive objects in sex scenes on camera. In Dinçel's film, however, the performer (of fellatio) is also the director, guiding the story unfolding on screen. The cast of two perform to a changing soundscape: the immersive scene of fellatio begins to the sound of pleasant humming. The humming stops, and the same voice becomes analytical when reciting the above theory on self-representation. The performer-filmmaker doubles as feminist theorist, someone who is directing and guiding how this representation is created and how it unfolds on screen.
Programming these projects in an ethnographic film festival provided a platform for two very different approaches to imagining feminist futurity through filmmaking. Dinçel uses residual technologies to perform multivocality: a performer on screen, a scholar reciting theory, a director and editor shaping the representation that is eventually shown on screen. By contrast, Allahyari embraces new digital technologies, like three-dimensional simulation and VR, to revive and reimagine historical figures through a feminist lens. They are of interest to feminist anthropologists for their auto-ethnographic sensibilities, performativity and research-based interventions into stories rooted in their own communities and subjective experiences. These projects help to inform more expansive approaches to curating, viewing and valuing feminist film and media production in ethnographic film venues.
Nat Nesvaderani
Laval University natalie.nesvaderani@ant.ulaval.ca
References
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Maravilla, G. 2021. Seven Ancestral Stomachs. Sculpture and sound art. https://www.guadalupemaravilla.com/seven-ancestral-stomachs (June 1, 2023).
Sangalang, C. C. and C. V. 2017. ‘Intergenerational Trauma in Refugee Families: A Systematic Review’. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 19 (3): 745–754. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10903-016-0499-7.
Smith, C. A. 2016. ‘Facing the Dragon: Black Mothering, Sequelae, and Gendered Necropolitics in the Americas’. Transforming Anthropology 24 (1): 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12055.
