ex-situ

More about the thinking behind Ex-Situ

Ex Situ, as an emergent paradigm, is about reconceptualizating place in the mobility of bodies and ideas rather than in the fixity of location itself. Place, we posit, is a category of consciousness that is relational and is subject to ongoing interruptions and transformations. Ex Situ foregrounds the mobile body of the writer and the text, the artist and the work, the photographer and the image, and the philosopher and the idea. Ex Situ, we propose, is doing the work of expanding the humanities’ tool kit in response to an ever-changing world that is bound up with changing technologies.

Ex Situ emerged through interdisciplinary conversations and distinct group projects, meetings and workshops in the UK and the US over the last five years. The ideas explored emerged out of conferences such as Ethnographic Dreamworlds (organized by Allen Shelton at Buffalo College), Ethnographic History writing workshops (Lancaster), the Public Feelings writing group (University of Texas, Austin), and Ethnographic Terminalia’s art gallery shows featuring intellectually complex and aesthetically challenging modes of exhibition (Philadelphia, New Orleans, Montreal, San Francisco, New York, Chicago). The co-investigators recognized through their participation in these various conversations and events, a general pattern emerging: the relationship of place to mobility needed a more coherent framework.

In 2013, we began planning a project and experimental workshop combining art and ethnography for April 9 and 12, 2014 held at The University of Texas at Austin, and the desert town of Marfa, Texas. This event was supported by the University of Texas at Austin (Anthropology Department and the College of Liberal Arts) and The Marfa Book Company. The aim was for presenters to give a paper in Austin on the subject of place and travel, and to then negotiate our own way to Marfa, a seven hour drive and to write/present the journey at the meeting in Marfa. The participants came from the UK as well as across the US. The workshop, which also involved research students, was inspiring, uniquely productive and methodologically promising. There was much interest in pursuing this further with a view to organizing an international group of academics working on this project, and to build linkages with art/media collectives, organizations and communities in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union – and in the longer term, the Asia-Pacific.

Ex Situ derives its inquiry from several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and is driven by inter- and cross-disciplinary ideas in Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Geography, Archaeology, Sociology, Political Science, Literature, Philosophy, Environmental Studies, Science and Technology Studies as well as artistic movements such as Surrealism, Site-Specificity, Abstraction, Situationism as well as projects such as Mass Observation. We will be individually dealing with critical topics as a group though we will be looking at the specificities of place and travel from a spectrum of methodological practices. The group comprise of two co-investigators who are from History and Anthropology respectively, with another eighteen associate members in Canada, US, UK and Germany – of whom five are members of the planning group. We hope to expand the group’s activity through international networking with more academics, artist, creative practitioners, and community organizers, building on established links from the different projects mentioned above.

The Ex Situ project explores experimental methodologies alongside the theorization of situatedness and site-specificity. Our commitment to experimental methodologies covers both research and publication. It is driven by our observation that rapidly shifting social worlds require flexible and responsive tools for analysis. The focus on site-specificity and situatedness considers place and being as malleable—at once mutable and mobile in all their formations. It is in this malleability that ideas grow and can be shaped, informing and transforming our appreciation of place and location. The rather simple goal of Ex Situ is to create a framework within which humanities scholars and art/media practitioners in collaboration with the social sciences can think through the expanded geographies of place. Description, which is the shared foundation of so many of our projects, is often overshadowed by theory and critique. The aesthetic or sensory foundations of seeing place, hearing place, feeling place, being in place, etc. are found to have a profoundly challenging impact on the conventional academic studies. Jacques Rancière’s long exploration of aesthetics and the imaginary makes a similar claim to the importance of writing to thinking, to making the world available to critique, and ultimately to change.

As distinct from travel and mobility, we focus on that which is site-specific—to interrogate the layers of meaning of place and experience, location and proximity. In Ex Situ mobility is explored as an extension of the historicizing and attentive work of site-specificity. We consider journeying as part of the process of arriving, departing, and dwelling, embodying the experience of mingled spaces – as insiders and outsiders. We understand methodology itself as formative, as evolving, and one that is in process and arising out of engagement with the subject-matter. We aim to explore through emerging locative technologies, creative forms of documentation, and extending the archive – eg. ethnographic writing, diaristic projects, experimental image making, film and photography, (eg. smartphone pictures, found photography), audio, art and installation, architecture. We hope to develop a framework within which participants can generate innovative and responsive ethnographic methods to capture the categories of consciousness – the affects of site specificness – emotions, reverie, interiority, mood, feelings. In doing so, we also hope to be able to theorize situatedness more effectively through different but overlapping disciplinary trajectories and tools.

Ex-Situ is a project led by Craig Campbell and Yoke Sum Wong