We are teachers and researchers working with first-person narratives through audiovisual and its mediation processes, as well as contemporary artistic practices and their creative processes. Our partnership was born in the Post-Graduation Program in Visual Art and Culture at FAV / UFG, in Brazil 2019, when we realized that we were working closely with content and processes with our students, focusing on first-person narratives, although in different ways. José Ribeiro, in the discipline Fieldwork and digital narratives, started from preliminary questions of self-recognition in the present situation of “learning” - who am I? What am I doing here? The know thyself placed in the courtyard of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, according to the writer Pausânias, constituted in my understanding an important starting point for all of us apprentices. Also important is the place where we want to go. These questions spawned the proposal to build a short visual, audiovisual or performance narrative to introduce the students and, in the continuation of this first production, the elaboration of a logbook or a portfolio of each of the participants that would accompany the development of the discipline. Thus, we tried to construct meaningful learnings of subjects and subjectivities that built, met, recognize themselves and others, present and socialize themselves beyond the school context of the classroom, project themselves as “transforming action”, in an intercultural, interdisciplinary, transmedia and emotive crossing. In the discipline Autobiographical Acts and Decolonial Practices in Visual Arts, Manoela approached first-person narratives from the visual arts, seeking to experience the field of autobiography under the lens of decoloniality studies. Based on autobiogeography, Manoela proposed to the students a critical and poetic exercise in the construction of the autobiographical space. To this end, she gifted a small wooden box to each student who, in turn, decided what would constitute such a space, plus what would not be considered, thus bringing to consciousness the processes of construction of self narratives. The concepts “space” and “place” articulated by humanist and feminist geography, as well as debates about politics of place and identity in the field of writings on postcolonial life were important activators of the proposal. Each box generated a particular autobiogeography, that is, a critically situated autobiographical narrative that highlights the displacement experiences - geographic and identity - of the people involved in selecting what remains or comes out of the box. In the proposal for the Summer Course, participants will receive a brief introduction on the concept of autobiogeography and autobiographical research based on artistic practice, and will try to build their own autobiographical spaces in small containers provided at the beginning of the course. The goal is to observe how we create and edit the narratives that build our idea of self.

This project, started in 2018, developed in 2020 a new, intensifyng stage with the initiation of teachers to audiovisual production and its use in creative processes in education, with the meeting in Melgaço of Marajó between the Mayors of Melgaço of Minho and Melgaço of Marajó and the development of research with midwives and teachers in Melgaço. We will present these project developments focusing on participatory audiovisual ethnographic explorations and the creative processes in art and culture through the audiovisual productions of researchers and teachers involved in the project, photographs taken on route, and exercises of “talking photographs” aimed at the deepening of Participative Audiovisual Ethnographies. We understand that all the undertaken work is a valid contribution to a multicultural, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multi-media and emotive journey that we hope to develop in the next stages.

Based on Pedagogy, Philosophy, Audiovisual Sciences and Cinema, the collective Educar la Mirada has been developing, in the last two years, a reflection on our practices in which we observe confluences with visual anthropology at work with the identity of people, in the pedagogical documentation or point of view from which audiovisual productions are made. The project we are presenting focuses on autobiography as an expression of personal narration of the self. The main interest has been the use of audiovisuals as a work tool in the elaboration of self narratives as an element of expression for groups that do not produce cinematographic works; and that in Anthropology has been named (audio) visual without authorship. Working with older women (around 80 years old) from the municipality of Leganés made it possible to inquire about their recollections and memories. This format has meant the use of documents, stories and reports that have supposed narratives representing decisive moments in their lives. These are first-person accounts that have a concrete presence in the lives of these women and acquire a sense of "My self" through a resource presented as a form of expression of identity. We propose to develop practice work using objects from our closest culture that will allow for the creation of an audiovisual production relating to the very identities of the people present at the meetings. We also intend to project the assembled productions in the following days.

The eruption of the “self”, the “I” of filmmakers in documentary narratives has been one of the fundamental identity marks of non-fiction cinema of the 21st century. In Latin America, documentary tradition has become a territory largely reluctant to explicitly incorporate authorial subjectivity in works. This panorama began to change in the eighties due to the influence of television and journalistic formats, but also with the emergence of experimental forms within non-fiction in the international film scene. The 1990s provided a glimpse of some films narrated in the first person by Latin American directors, in many cases in a situation of migration and deterritorialization. Undoubtedly, from the year 2000, documentary films have emerged that incorporate some modulation of the authorial "I" in their narrative structure and this produces profound changes in the ways in which the works will represent reality and the historical past. Memory discourses, based on narratives organized about personal experience, are the main protagonists of documentaries from the first two decades of the 21st century. However, the future of this type of documentary film seems to be glimpsed in works that do not focus on the exploration of time and personal memory, but rather involve the authorial “I” in a complex web of stories and characters, in which circulation across the space (and the conflicts that this entails) takes on greater prominence.

The emergence of the first person in documentary film is not a fact disconnected from cultural transformations, but as broad ones that had a great impact on artistic and intellectual expressions such as the crisis of large narratives and totalizing explanations, the profusion of small narratives, the discourse about the world centered on subjectivity and the biographical and autobiographical trajectories of its authors. The first-person documentary also contributed to the accessibility of sound and image technologies, with the emergence of video and successive technological innovations, the availability of editing and composition software, as well as the economic and political requirements that facilitated the profusion of solitary, independent filmmakers and the surfacing of first-person cinema. However this does not constitute a break with the past, but the development in what was already latent since the 1960s and which in the subsequent years found appropriate conditions for its development. The themes are not particularly innovative, not even their social function. The novelty / innovation consists above all in the treatment of themes and social phenomena from the experience of oneself, the individual, personal, in order to tackle them. In this session we will invite a female filmmaker to present her personal experience of creativity in the first person.

Throughout the 20th century, photography gradually and massively introduced itself into people's lives, occupying a prominent place in albums, the decoration of the house and domestic and community archives as a privileged support for biographical and historical recording and description. Going through domestic photo albums, as well as collections of ethnographic photographs, sets the tone for a journey through history and culture told in the first person. Personal photographs travel through their own, domestic circuit, but also extend along pathways designed by family, neighbourhood and emotive networks. Its language is, therefore, different from professional photography, whose contribution is public, in contrast, aimed at common communication and disconnected from elements of local identification as well as private and home uses and customs. To the eye of the investigator, domestic photographs are a window into everyday life, the practices and customs, as well as an interesting aesthetic break with the paradigms in force in art photography. However, at the same time, domestic photographs are also the opportunity for, among their holders and those figured in them, a reflection that is both self-identifying and autobiographical. We propose to meet at the center of an exhibition of photographs collected among the inhabitants of Castro Laboreiro. With Manuel Sendón, we will travel through the potential of analytical and aesthetic possibilities contained therein.

Since 2011, my research and creation work has explored intimacy, family life, time-image-memory, and these specific works are included in the series “Family Archives”, which is constantly developing and crisscrosses several perspectives and artistic fields, such as photography, performance, cinema and relational aesthetics. This research begins by investigating and collecting public or private archives - files that contain films and Super 8, analogue photographs, letters, slides, objects, etc. - to then be brought together in artistic experiments reorganized, revisited, confronted and manipulated by editing, the implementation of collages and sound fragments, exploration of the idea of image as an experience of the ephemerality of time and memory, also utilizing other real image registers, a research work around time-image-memory-dream-woman. The archives gather, preserve, and organize documentation that shows us past events. They are sources of knowledge that intimate facts that are supposed to be true, especially when the photographic support operates as a memory vehicle. The archive is memory and this memory enhances, informs and alters the present reality. Photography fixes a moment, builds identities, constitutes a micro-history, but it does not tell us everything. Memory is a fact and can also be considered a testimony of a past, transmitting a history. Photography and memory are connected by their capacity for past events, allowing for remembrance and displacement of the original moment in time and space. Traveling in the Time of Others - Castro Laboreiro is part of the Family Archive work, emergent from the Family Album creation, and transformed into other creations like the one I propose. The show intends to provide the spectator with a family gathering. I propose a return to the familiar ritual of viewing photographs, their materiality, photographs that are often from travels, festivities, moments of everyday life and most of the time articulated with texts or captions. It is also important to be able to experience the report in the first person about a certain photograph, since the registered image is important for those who were part of it, as well as the imagery of people and their observational take on a certain image. In collaboration with MDOC - Melgaço International Documentary Festival, a group of female residents of Castro Laboreiro, those who stayed and saw their husbands, children and brothers depart, will revisit visual documents, on a journey that aims to revisit a memory, culture, heritage, traversing personal stories that go through the era and its socioeconomic context.

Photography and film archives are fragments of memories rooted in the weight of years of experience in the field. The documentaries made from these archives seek to bring memories and representations to the general public, mediated by editing and first-person narratives. The inhabited stories and fieldwork leave their context and are conveyed by the narrative of a documentary. The spectator can see, feel and imagine the experiences of those who produced the ethnographic archive. Investigators can relive these experiences on the field by recounting memories derived from the archive. Documentaries made from archives will offer a new generation the opportunity to live these experiences and understand the relationship between memory and framework. Sometimes, half a century of fieldwork life is summarized in a 60-minute film where each word brings together memories and representations, and the first person narrative tries to convey the emotions present in the archives. We propose a reflection on issues related with ethnographic archives and relations with memory and representation today: how to respect the transmission of knowledge that has accumulated over decades? How to respect the traditions and customs existing in the archives, when bringing them to the big screen? How can a first-person narrative take viewers on a journey through time? What ethical issues do archives pose today?

Participation in Hop to Melgaço