Migratory Embodied Experiences: The Convergence of Sensory Ethnography and Experimental Documentary

The thesis explores the capacity and operations of video-making to evoke, amplify and transmit our transcultural affects. I draw upon Spinoza’s notion of affect that simultaneously refer to both affect as a change in the state of existence, and affection, which suggests the effect of another body on another. To address this two-sided understanding of affect, I draw upon Simondon’s transindividuality, Bergsonian memory and Deleuzian film theory. I also would like to situate this project within the collaboration between anthropology and art, which takes into account the relational and processual understanding of the individual, and the capacity of our body to affect and to be affected. My ethnographic video project Migratory Affects can be described as an assemblage of particular moments and expressions of transcultural experience unfolding in a particular spatiotemporal setting, which is widened up by the plurality of temporalities, sensoria and realities that we come into contact within the midst of our relational becomings.