This project invites members of the Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities of Brazil to visit the UK and host an innovative spatial audio installation for 10 days using a cutting-edge 3D sound speaker array. Project partners will participate in a 4 month period of collaborative exchange over zoom, followed by an in-person event with a spatial audio installation in the UK. These projects each explored how participative and collaborative methods with indigenous communities can contribute towards new approaches to ecology and heritage conservation, participatory research and dissemination, and inclusive approaches to supporting diversity in technological innovation.
This project proposes to invite Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous
communities to engage with the Grant Museum of Zoology Collections at UCL, in order to collaboratively develop an online exhibit that explores participatory approaches and innovative methods of presenting zoology and natural history collections to a wide public audience. In doing so, this project aims to challenge the historical exclusion of indigenous voices from the practices of natural history curation, narration and display, while exploring how innovative exhibition methods can engage broader and more diverse publics.
LOCATION: Mato Grosso do Sul
MEDIUM: VR, 360 Video, Ambisonic Sound,
Photogrammetry, Photography,
SUPPORTED BY: UCL Global Engagement Fund
LOCATION: Online Seminar Series
MEDIUM: Interactive Workshops and Public Performance, London Climate Action Week, live performance
SUPPORTED BY: Residency at MONOM Studios, Berlin
This year we will extend our collaboration further, as support from UCL Music Futures has made it possible for two Guarani and Kaiowá representatives to visit the UK and join our team in-person. Mba’ekuaa: Guarani and Kaiowá Archival Futures project will be developed between May and July 2023 through a series of residencies, workshops and public events in London and elsewhere, featuring live sonic performances, talks and panel discussions with participants and guests, and collaborative jam sessions where community members will be joined by researchers, artists and musicians in a creative dialogue and exchange.
This project aims to establish an international partnership between artists, anthropologists, indigenous communities, sound designers and botanists, in an interrogation of the role of sound in ecological knowledge and archival practice. Establishing a creative dialogue between the divergent approaches to ecological knowledge articulated by G&K indigenous communities and botanists at the Escola de Botanica in São Paulo.
In this project, UCL MAL will produce collaboratively with the Guarani & Kaiowá indigenous women, a Virtual Museum supported on the Mozilla Hubs platform. This Virtual Museum project seeks to address concerns raised by indigenous communities regarding community access to heritage management by creating a digital infrastructure through which local communities can preserve, curate, and display their material and immaterial cultural heritage.
This project aims to create an interactive map showing the incidence and geographical distribution of violence against women in Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities in Brazil. This partnership with Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities seeks to support indigenous women’s strategies to combat gender inequalities by providing a digital infrastructure that allows gender-based violence to be monitored and made visible.
This project aims to document the material processes and technical knowledge through which Guarani & Kaiowá ceremonial houses are constructed and the ritual practices that these structures enable. A wide range of recording techniques will be used in the process of documentation. All the recordings will be delivered to the British Museum's Endangered Material Knowledges Program
This project is a collaborative knowledge-exchange between UCL MAL and the Kuñangue Aty Guasu: the Guarani & Kaiowá indigenous women’s council meeting, which this year will take place onlineIn tandem, we are finalising preparations for MAL’s Multimedia Encounters conference, and the translation of this event into an online format invites us to reflect on the parallels between the knowledge practices of indigenous communities and those of anthropologists.
Plantaphilia is a collaborative project that consists of a series of analog films exploring the life of plants through responsive visual and sound, encompassing the perspective of plant ontology. The plants are specifically connected to the history of botany and medicine, acknowledging the colonial encounter between the Old and the New World and consequently how plants are seeing and spread.
This exhibition examined technologies of capture and perspective exchange, exploring their role in both art and anthropology. Taking place in the context of Higher Resolution, as part of TATE Exchange, we led a workshop that explored how ways of seeing and believing encode themselves into technological objects.
The MAL collective uses multimedia approaches to examine the human, more-than-human, and posthuman entanglements present in the context of the ‘Anthropocene’ – a concept which has been both commended and critiqued across academic disciplines. Through theoretical and practical sessions, the MAL collective seeks to rethink knowledge beyond he conceptual divisions between nature/culture and representation/reality in the context of the ‘Anthropocene’.
This project presents an immersive and interactive 360 environment which permits the viewer to explore the different cultural and ecological landscapes of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. By using VR/360 video to create an immersive experience of alternative perspectives on human-environment relations, this interdisciplinary project aims to develop practical mechanisms for immersive technologies to change the ways human-environment relationships are perceived and understood.