Karrabing member Elizabeth A. Povinelli offers crucial insight into the background and specific context from which the Indigenous collective’s working methods have developed in this special masterclass. The talk elaborates specifically on the technique of improvisation as a performative tool that establishes a certain aesthetic in the films; as a means of manifesting impulses that aid in the task of social analysis; and as an extension of the daily strategies of improvisation necessary to live in a settler state.
Biography
Elizabeth A. Povinelli (b.1962, United States) is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. Her writing is focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that supports what she calls ‘an anthropology of the otherwise’.