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*Rituals at the Margins of the Sinosphere: Performative Ethnography*

Speaker:

Alberto Gerosa
(The Chinese University

of Hong Kong,

Adjunct Assistant Professor)



*20 February 2025, **10:00 - 17:45*

*Conference Room 2B, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences,
Academia Sinica (map
)*

Alberto Gerosa moved to China in 2007, where he has focused on rituals of
marginalised groups. The resulting body of non-written scholarship
investigates the ridge of ritual and performance, engaging subaltern
communities in the sinosphere and beyond to articulate and channel their
practices of resistance through participatory artistic creation. These
films and performances shed light on overwhelming collective experiences of
resistance, effective rites of passage (Turner, 1969) transforming
participants from inexperienced and separated individuals into a cohesive
community.



Inspired by visual anthropology mentor Hu Tai Li, by sharing the means of
representation collectively, Gerosa questions authorship in ethnographic
knowledge production, offering a performative celebration of the concept of
imponderabilia (Malinowski), and its serendipitous nature and agency.
Directly engaging informants as co/authors in performance and filmmaking,
these works creatively render informants' emotional experiences as
singularities within the multitude of their respective groups, unleashing a
larger social impact within Greater China.



This practice grapples with the emergence and dissemination of collective
emotions: in retracing these rituals of resistance as ‘appearing’ from a
heterogeneous and dynamic ‘multitude’ (Negri, Hardt, 2004), Gerosa traces
community formation as cemented over ‘ritualised forms’ (Turner, 2017),
which are emotionally sustained by shared ‘affects’ (Clough, 2020), whose
fabric is, in turn, a collection of sensorial ‘apparitions’ (Yanai, 2018)
resulting from collective experiences of the ‘demos’ (Pang, 2020).



*Speaker :*

*Alberto Gerosa Volontè 影波* (PhD) is an award-winning film and theatre
director, teaching theatre and visual anthropology at CUHK. Previously a
visiting scholar at Tokyo University *Image Anthropology Lab*, he taught in
Antwerp, Beijing Normal and Baptist University UIC. His performative
practice addresses ritual in the sinosphere. Universities and art
Institutions in Canada, Japan, Russia, England, Belgium among others
dedicated retrospectives on his works, and in 2022 his ethnographic film *Dea
-Migrants Built This City* was awarded by cineteca di Bologna for
"surpassing the distinction between documentary and fiction". He is
currently working on a Hong Kong remake of Chris Marker's La Jetèe.



*Detailed Schedule :*

*10:00-12:30 World-Building Lab: Overcoming Collective Traumas Through
Sci-Fi*

This is a hands-on scriptwriting laboratory. We will collectively
hypothesize a plausible sci-fi re-interpretation of local histories.
Participants will experiment with the practice of world-building applied to
their own past and future.



Since the early 20th century, sci-fi has allowed the channeling of views
from the margins disguised under the supposedly otherness of its genre.
During the cold war, profoundly transformative grassroots narratives
impacted societies from both the Soviet and Western blocs. More recently,
regional futurisms constitute anti-hegemonic counter imaginations,
belonging to critical art and theory. They contribute to emancipate
distinct imaginations from the systems often imposed on indigenous
histories and subjects. Can there be an ethnographic sci-fi? Bring your pen
and notebook to find out.



*12:30-13:30 Lunch Break*



*13:30 Screening of Xiao Pengke (doc. 25', 2008)*



*14:00 Masterclass: *

Theatre and Ritual as a Performative Ethnography

performances:
- *Chicken Blood*

- *Water Margin*

- *Holy Spring!*

- *Soil*

- *Uninvited Art Residency*



The Masterclass introduces performative and theatrical ways of gathering,
processing and divulgating Anthropological data in greater China. Dwelling
in the borderlands between art and academia, these performative approaches
to fieldwork engage informants and audiences through participatory methods,
allowing for serendipity to dictate the course of action.



With the assumption that aesthetic experience is foundational to
communities, these ethnographies constitute a collective re-appropriation
of the means of representation by subaltern groups within the Sinosphere;
often through parody, for raising awareness of power relations within a
specific community. These methods depart from the conventional
anthropological practice, celebrate imponderabilia (Malinowski) and are an
invitation for further experimentation within poetics and politics of
knowledge production.



These works offer a contemporary application to the ‘shared anthropology’
method of Jean Rouch; to the multidisciplinary and activist practice of
Ernesto De Martino, and to the self-transformative techniques of Jerzy
Grotowski. By sharing the means of representation collectively, I question
authorship in ethnographic knowledge production, creatively rendering
informants' emotional experiences as singularities within the multitude of
their respective groups.



*15:30-16:00 Coffee Break*



*16:00 Dea (documentary, 72')*
Dea leaves rural Indonesia and her singing dreams to migrate to Hong Kong
as a foreign domestic worker. The script is the result of a nine-months
acting improv laboratory with a group of Indonesian women migrant domestic
workers, who have been victims of domestic violence while working in Hong
Kong.


*17:15 Q&A with the director*
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