Maputo, Mozambique
13 to 19 September 2004
Over the past
few decades, visual sources have emerged as a powerful means of
gaining access to alternative histories. It is increasingly
acknowledged that visual traces and records, whether art or
documentary, offer new routes to the past – especially where the
life experiences and expression of people of the South have been
marginalized in external or dominant literary sources. We need
to explore how far visual sources (as opposed to
conventionally-accepted written and oral sources) might enable
us to produce a new range of inclusive and localized histories
that take into account these traditionally marginalized groups.
The immediate
goal of this South/South workshop is to contribute to the
training of researchers dealing with alternative historical
sources, with a view to exchanging experiences, theories and
methodologies on the visual, by gathering together some fifteen
researchers from Latin America, Africa, Southern Asia and the
Caribbean for a period of one week. The ultimate aim of this
workshop is to unsettle the unquestioned hegemony of the written
word at the same time as complementing what it can offer, by
collecting and building knowledge based on visual material and
demonstrating its relevance to the study of groups marginalized
in textual sources.
The programme will
include historical, theoretical and interpretive frameworks, to
provide a critical vocabulary for reading the visual and to open
up methods of constituting visual ‘evidence’ that illuminate new
histories of the South. The contexts and processes through which
visual materials and performances are made offer additional
practical insights.
This programme aims to promote reflection and debate amongst
researchers of Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, on how
the visual turn confronts our received notions of the past with
new theoretical and methodological issues. The idea is to enable
participants to identify and share knowledge derived from their
own activities. It will also highlight the technical and
interpretive skills involved in visual literacy, and provide a
good sense of the conceptual debates in this field. Thus we not
only engage with new visual data and its huge potential for
reconstituting the past from a variety of locations in the
South, but we also intend to push the existing boundaries of
debate by considering the use and abuse (or ethics) of visual
sources in history.
The programme,
which will include lectures and workshop sessions, combines both
theoretical and practical specialisations on visual sources. The
course will involve the following: historical and contemporary
forms of visual events, such as ritual, spectacle,
performance, rally, etc.; visual objects, such as art, architecture,
clothing, the body, etc.; media, such as television and various
forms of indigenous media; and visual communication through
photography, posters, video, film. Philosophical questions
concerning the nature of the image, visibility and invisibility
(especially in relation to gender), and the distinction/overlap
between the categories of public and visual, will be given
space; as will the problem of the archive (for example in the
lack of importance attributed to photographs, and the
accompanying questions of discovery and conservation).
