Filming Papoula. Multimodal Ethnography and Experimental Collaborations

Abstract

In august 2018 the authors worked with Kasper, an emerging pop artist from Brazil, to co-create the music video Papoula. The article explores the experimental collaborations that took place during the filming of the videoclip and the reflexive interactions that happened during the multimodal ‘writing’ process. For that reason, the article is experimental in form, curating and mediating between various multimodal texts: the written word, timelapse animations, photographs and audio recordings. These multimodal dialogical forms of representation describe the web of interactions, encounters, negotiations and frictions that occurred during the creation of the videoclip. The article also explores the idea of space regarded as a ‘fieldwork device’, space becoming a locus of entanglements between human and non-human agencies. The artist’s home and studio (The Kasper Factory) converts into a ‘factory’ of audio-visual creation during the videoclip production but also into a laboratory for anthropological experimental collaborations. The dynamics of the text fluctuates between the voices of the authors, as anthropologists and their experiences as artists involved in the production of the music video. In this way the article reveals the processes of creation of a music video and the 'anthropological inventions' through a multimodal discourse that takes the form of a collaborative roleplay, having important methodological, epistemological and political consequences.