‘Woundscapes’: suffering, creativity and bare life – practices and processes of an ethnography-based art exhibition

Abstract

‘Woundscapes’ is an exhibition collaboratively produced by 11 anthropologists and artists from different countries, whose work focuses on the reproduction of particular gazes, stereotypes and individual memories that are all connected to respective diasporic dynamics. The works presented at the exhibition attempted to map different forms of dealing with, understanding and expressing ‘suffering’. The works examined individual and collective trajectories of ‘suffering’ and related ‘cure’ strategies in the healthcare market of Greater Lisbon, and different forms and tactics of legitimisation, resistance or reconceptualisation of social positions. The aim of this article is to 1) present the conceptual design of the research underpinning the exhibition; 2) explore the curatorial process of attempting to elude the very distance between object and representation, between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and, thus, to elude the ever-encompassing metaphor of the north–south divide, to give visitors the opportunity to creatively experience different paths of exclusion and integration, of distancing and participation; and 3) reflect on the state of liminality created by the exhibition, undermining the conventional categorical distinction between ethnography and art, and causing an interference in the established circuits of academia, and in those of contemporary art.