easa

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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