Abstract

In 2017, while living in two geographically distant locations, South African artist Katherine Bull and French artist Emmanuel de Montbron collaborated on a project in which they used mobile phones and an online blog to share stories about their experiences of place. The end product of their collaboration is Towards Telepathy (2017), a two-channel video that engages viewers on a visceral rather than a merely visual level. In a similar manner, artists who participated in the virtual exhibition of the 2020 Lagos Photo Festival, titled Home Museum (2020), used photographs to produce narratives of home and belonging that are shared with others in an online environment. In this article, I explore how Towards Telepathy and selected photographs from Home Museum draw on memories of multiple senses in order to relate stories of place-making when geographic and physical distance has become the norm. I argue that all the artists can be regarded as sensory autoethnographers, as they used digital technologies to record and present their life histories virtually. Furthermore, I analyse the video and the photographs with reference to Laura Marks’ notions of haptic visuality and recollection-objects. These lenses allow me to show how the images increase the potential for distant others to empathically connect with the artists’ personal and collective stories of place and belonging by evoking sense-based perceptions other than sight.

摘要

2017 年，南非艺术家凯瑟琳·布尔 (Katherine Bull) 和法国艺术家埃马纽埃尔·德·蒙布朗 (Emmanuel de Montbron) 居住在两个地理位置相距遥远的地方，但他们合作开展了一个项目，在该项目中，他们使用手机和在线博客分享他们在当地的经历故事。他们合作的最终产品是Towards Telepathy (2017)，这是一部双频道视频，让观众在本能而非视觉层面上参与。以类似的方式，参加 2020 年拉各斯摄影节虚拟展览的艺术家名为家庭博物馆(2020)，他们使用照片来讲述家庭和归属感，并在在线环境中与他人分享。在这篇文章中，我探讨了如何走向心灵感应和从中选择的照片当地理和物理距离已成为常态时，家庭博物馆利用多种感官的记忆来讲述场所营造的故事。我认为所有的艺术家都可以被视为感官民族志学家，因为他们使用数字技术来虚拟地记录和呈现他们的生活历史。此外，我还参考了劳拉·马克斯 (Laura Marks) 的触觉视觉和回忆对象的概念来分析视频和照片。这些镜头让我能够展示图像如何通过唤起视觉以外的基于感官的感知来增加远方其他人与艺术家的个人和集体故事以及归属感产生共鸣的可能性。