Workshop II – Audio-visual techniques and methods in multisensory ethnography

As a former student of Prof. Salzbrunn’s course on Artivism, I was invited as a guest-speaker to the ERC workshop to talk about my fieldwork and my multi-sensory ethnography on Place Pury, a central square in the city of Neuchâtel. I had collected sensations of people walking by and I had asked them to talk to me about this city-square. The objective was to question academic norms where the visual has more legitimacy than other senses, and the written text carries more weight than other media.

Questions about the appropriation of space, the recollection of oral history, and the subjective experience of people on public spaces were central topics on my work. Concerning the final work I aimed to create a hybrid result that could question the boundaries between art and anthropology. My fieldwork resulted in a polyphonic and sometimes contradictory discourse on the Place Pury in Neuchâtel.

The outcome of my work consists of a number of audio-tracks made out of passerby’s testimonies, and of a notebook with drawings, handwritten descriptions, and a lists of sensations and poems on my own experience on this square. In the soundtracks you can hear people talking about their sensations and telling anecdotes about the square. Those tracks function in relation to my notebook where some stickers inform you which track to listen to in relation to the content of the notebook.

Audio tracks can be hear on soundcloud : Here

Clémentine Künzler