38 minutes of anthropology, mini-DV, color, sound, 40′, video-installation, MFA Thesis (UCLA)
“38 minutes of anthropology (strangers to ourselves)” is a video project that reflects upon issues of displacement, home, exile, limits, foreignness, language, and identity. In a time where globalization and mobility are praised as fundamental and unavoidable aspects of a new century, this art-documentary-video seeks the implications and effects of people’s journeys and displacements, trying to find or even questioning the very possibility of finding a place in the world.
Through a series of conversations and interviews, there was a search for an intimate and confessional mode where the core of these realities could be discussed and approached in a non-conclusive way: just pointing out and leaving it open for further reflection.
Arguably an exercise of psychic transfer and alter egos, “38 minutes of anthropology” brings up the question of the Other, as not only the one estranged from us, but that one inside us.
As Julia Kristeva states, in her seminal work “strangers to ourselves”:
Shall we be, intimately and subjectively, able to live with the others, to live as others, without ostracism but also without leveling? The question arises again: no longer that of welcoming the foreigner within a system that obliterates him but of promoting the togetherness of those foreigners that we all recognize ourselves to be.
Living with the other, with the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of being an Other. It is not simply a matter of our being able to accept the other, but of being in his place, and this means to imagine and make oneself other for oneself.
Originally this video is integrated in a video-installation comprising two parts. The main one is a projection in which one may listen to the conversations with the seven people chosen by the artist, and a second moment where, in a little hall, a small flat screen with two headphones displays again 38 minutes, but now with the subtitle “alter ego” (Here, a Portuguese-American citizen is interviewed and one can closely hear an intimate and
highly confessional life story where major issues of foreignness, displacement and multiple exiles are addressed).
In each one of these parts, some texts are inserted as another voice juxtaposed to the previous voices. In the end, one realizes that this ninth character is indeed the author – the transcription of his own words after a self-interview process.