Leverhulme funding announced for Latin American Visual Cultures project
Research project inspired by recent approaches to study of visual technologies in anthropological fieldwork
Dr Luciana Martins, reader in Latin American Visual Cultures, has been awarded a 2016 Leverhulme Research Fellowship for two years for a project entitled ‘Drawing together: the visual archive of expeditionary fieldwork’.
The Fellowship, which is awarded by the Leverhulme Trust on the basis of a competitive application process for applicants both within and outside higher education institutions across the UK, is for experienced researchers to conduct a programme of original research in any discipline.
Inspired by recent approaches to the study of visual technologies in anthropological fieldwork, Dr Martins’ project explores the practice and experience of image-making as deployed on European expeditions to South America from the 1850s to the 1950s.
Developing from her previous research on sketching, photography and documentary film, the project investigates the various forms and contexts of visual engagement in the field, examining in particular the relationship between drawing, photography and film-making as embodied practices of in situ observation, including their role in cross-cultural exchanges and encounters.
“I am particularly interested in the dialogic practice of visual representation and its affective investments,” says Dr Martins. “Working on the rich and diverse visual archive of South America produced by European travellers, including British botanist Richard Spruce, Italian artist Guido Boggiani and French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and his wife Dina Dreyfus, my aim is to trace the ways in which visual images negotiate the experience of field encounters, in the moment of their making and through their subsequent editing and re-editing in new contexts.”
Dr Martins is also part of a successful application for the British Council Institutional Links scheme for the project 'Mobilising the value of biocultural collections in Brazil’, led by the Instituto de Pesquisas Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro (JBRJ), in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), the Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro (FOIRN) and the Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi (MPEG).
The project aims to build capacity among Brazilian research institutes to research, catalogue and mobilise data from important collections, and to develop these unique resources for improved understanding of the useful and cultural properties of plants. It will facilitate and enhance development of data portals, making biocultural collections and associated data freely accessible, and will strengthen capacity of indigenous communities on the Rio Negro for autonomous research into material culture and plant use.