I am both an anthropologist and a film/video curator, and am interested in how contemporary anthropology may look like these days, what its multiple futures may be like. Anthropology may still go on being motivated by the cross-cultural logics characteristic of its cosmopolitan/modernist/avant-gardist legacy. It has perhaps already seceded from that legacy by emulating the heterogeneous procedures and dispositifs one sees today at work in contemporary art practices. These very practices put in trouble the very subfields I have been engaged with, namely, Visual anthropology and the Anthropology of Art.  In this context, it could also be that today anthropologists desire to do performance or body art, experiment with the rich perceptual, erotic and sensual repertoire of installation art, as they desired to do with ethnographic writing during the 1980s and 90s.

My work-in-process is an experiment to design an anthropological style and mode of presentation that builds on my residency in Mexico City where I have conducted an 18-month experimental fieldwork research around an assemblage linking contemporary anthropological, artistic, and curatorial practices. The process: a long-term dialogue and collaboration with Mexico City-based cultural experts who dwell in the affective and aesthetic landscape—the assemblage—we call the Visual Arts.  I am curious to explore the ‘installation form’, in particular,  as an instance of bio-aesthetics and as one potential future for anthropology to think its interventions.