Space and Culture

Craig Campbell at the f01k10r3 & public culture program is about to open an Intermedia Ethnographies Laboratory (building will be finished this time next year) at the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies (University of Texas, Austin). His show,  Ethnographic Terminalia is showing in Pittsburgh. Campbell’s work takes visual anthropology out of the museum and out of the cinema to explore what it does in the space of a gallery. In actuality this is not about Visual Anthropology at all, but what comes after. It critically questions and reflects on aesthetics of ethnographic display. This is an imbrication of aesthetics and politics –  an ‘Intermedia Ethnography’.

The work is introduced as a point and space which marks an end point, a crossing and opening onto a new space:

“The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the border: this exhibition is a celebration of these borders but not an exaltation; it is a playful engagement with reflexivity and positionality; it asks what lies beyond and what lies within. No longer content to theorize the ends of the discipline and possibilities of new media, new locations, or new methods of asking old questions, the ethnographers in this exhibition are working in capacity to develop generative ethnographies that do not subordinate the sensorium to the expository and theoretical text.”