Jeff Daniel Silva, resident at Iméra during the 2018-2019 academic year, contributed to the book Strata – Ethnographies indociles de mondes troublés, which has just been published by Sun editions.
Presentation
This book is a collective work born of a shared desire to rethink the way in which social science research is written and transmitted. Produced by a group of anthropologist-artists, it offers an original approach, combining text, image and sound, to examine in depth the narrative forms of contemporary anthropology.
Based on six ethnographic surveys carried out in France, Portugal, Romania and the Congo, this book explores sensitive experience in a variety of social and political contexts. Inspired by phenomenology, this research examines the living, relations between humans and non-humans, sensory perceptions, the soil, time, climate and colonial memory. In so doing, the book opens up a breach in the traditional modes of scientific narrative by proposing a decentred form of writing in which the figure of the author gives way to a shared arrangement of sensitive materials. In this way, narrative conception, graphic design and page layout are no longer secondary stages in the work, but acts integrated from the outset of the process of conceiving and telling the story of the scientific object. Form thus also becomes epistemological, and the form-content relationship an intentional force.
This book brings together research ideas that began to emerge during Jeff Silva’s residency at Iméra in 2018-2019, as part of the Arts and Sciences programme, and which already echoed Mediterranean themes. It is thanks to this residency, and in particular to the links established with La Fabrique des Écritures Ethnographiques, that this research was able to be carried out and lead to the publication of this book as well as the production of future audiovisual works.
This project is supported by the Amidex ANFAA Chair of Excellence (Alternative Narrative Forms in Audiovisual Anthropology) at Aix Marseille Université/IDEAS.
About Jeff Daniel Silva
Jeff Silva is a filmmaker and anthropologist from Boston and a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS Centre Norbert Elias in Marseille. Trained in film and the fine arts in the United States and holding a doctorate from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), his artistic practice focuses on the complex interactions between memory, time and space on individuals and ecosystems faced with conflicting social, political and economic pressures. He is currently conducting comparative research on three coastal sites in the United States, France and Romania.
Jeff is currently co-developing a new teaching and production laboratory in Marseille with Boris Petric, director of the Centre Norbert Elias, to produce works at the crossroads of artistic practice and social science research, entitled “La Fabrique des écritures”.
