Rendering Culture: Elsewhereness, The Ethnographic, The Surreal

Where are the ends of ethnography? How detached can a site-specific work be? The point of departure for discussing these questions is Elsewhereness, a series of site specific experimental films, by Anders Weberg and Robert Willim. These take the possibilities for digital media in relation to site specific art to its extremes, juxtaposing the nomadic with the placebound. The works in the series are made solely from audio and video material found on the web, material that emanates from a specific place. The audiovisual pieces are manipulated and composed into a surreal journey through an estranged landscape, based entirely on the culturally bound and stereotypical preconceptions of the artists about the actual location. Elsewhereness is a comment on ethnographic practices, especially the assumptions that ethnography should be associated with empirical intimacy and the possibility of coming close to people in various contexts. Within several ethnographies and socially oriented site-specific art we’ll often find certain ideals embraced: participation, proximity and ideas about being “loyal to the field”, bearing witness, giving voice to people etc. Elsewhereness is instead a site-specific work where distance and even alienation is evoked. Not in order to achieve some kind of nihilistic stance, but to examine the elongations of the site-specific and the ends of ethnography