Traces - For an Ethnography of Presence.
Revista Iluminuras. Porto Alegre, v.18, n.45, p.425-431, August/December 2017.
The present photographic essay is product of a personal experience as a PhD Candidate in a foreign country. Produced through trips to different Belgian localities, the essay sketches a reflection on the experience of an urban space that is eminently different from the Brazilian one. Such difference is translated, here, through traces of human presence inscribed in the landscape, up and down, allowing the reflection on the meaning of presence amidst a foreign place. Is it possible to be alone, even if alien to the place where we are? Produced by two cameras, one of which that of a mobile phone, the photographs stick to the canonical rules of composition, following the rule of thirds especially in what comes to the use of horizontal lines and vantage points for the creation of perspective. The topic also retakes a component of Belgian literary history, which is added to the scope of the essay as a transnational one.
Keywords: Traces; Belgium; Transnationality.
Registered throughout two years between four Belgian cities, the photographs that compose the following essay aim at a reflection on our relation of presence amongst the urban environment. In geographical and demographical terms, Belgian cities, even Brussels, will hardly surprise those natives to a global metropolis or megalopolis. Its appeals, however, lie precisely in the incomparable smallness in comparison to the big metropolis, a fact that brings out moments wherein a wanderer may find him/herself all alone through streets, avenues and alleys. This peculiar experience of absence amidst the urban complex, nonetheless, is composed by a series of sensory stimuli which lead the subject to undertake a new relationship with the urban. Although surrounded by absence, the wanderer is also surrounded by traces of human presence that may lead him/her to reconsider and to reconfigure notions of presence within everyday life. What this it means to make oneself present? What is present as a mode of existence (solitude, inhabit, co-exist, etc), and everyday experience? If it is inevitable, what is presence about and how does it come into being?
In the essay, views from a train window, iron structures, religious monuments, empty building, and even a buoy indicate precisely the traces that surround us day-to-day and that, perhaps unconsciously, brings us back to inevitable human presence. How is it possible to be alone if there is human presence all around us? On the bourgeois chamber of the 1880s, Walter Benjamin (2000, p. 266) had declared that ‘[…] the strongest impression that might irradiate amidst all the cosiness is: - You have nothing to search for in here – And that because there is no corner in which the inhabitant has not left its trace’. What to say, however, of the traces left by the city dwellers in the exterior space? Above and below, ahead and behind, it is precisely through these traces that Belgian cities offer the ethnographer distinct possibilities for articulating the relations of human presence within social space.
Furthermore, attempting to investigate this question through photography, the essay takes back a particular relation to Belgium in what touches upon visual arts and literature. It was there that one of the first and most important photo-literary works appeared, redefining and expanding on precept of francophone naturalism and realism. In Bruges-La-Morte (1892), Georges Rodenbach (cf. 1998), francophone author of Flemish origin, introduced in Western European literature a constructive principle for a romance composed by an innovative relation between text and photograph. Creating a phantasmal aspect over the city of Bruges, Rodenbach weaves, on heterodox fashion for a naturalist recurring to symbolist principles, a narrative in which textual and photographic images tend to totality. Regardless of his success, what Rodenbach does, indirectly, is reflecting over the meanings and experiences of presence. Starting from the mourning undergone by the main character, Rodenbach builds a narrative in which the city, endowed with its phantasmal aura, becomes itself a character. Urban space as a protagonist of narratives and reflexions, therefore, finds support in Belgian history. Add to that, it is worth mentioning, as Marc G. Blainey (2014) stresses, that anthropology has hardly ever been dedicated to Belgian reality as a case study, despite being a fertile object for ethnographic reflection, combining political, cultural and social aspects that allow a rich contribution to comprehending contemporary European society. This would, furthermore, help inverting anthropology’s mark which, up to this day, struggles with its colonial origins, trying to dissipate its collaboration with the mystification and centralization of a world view stemming from an eminently Eurocentric perspective.
Finally, articulating the question presented in the beginning of this text, referring to the relations of presence within the urban environment through traces produced by the human being, relations between base and superstructure underlie in the materiality that surround us in everyday life. Trains, buildings, statues and monuments are a product of human labour and, surrounding us, puts us into a direct relation with the fruits of intellectual and material labour. Suggesting both the wandering movement through arcades and tours, as culture’s monumentality in buildings and monuments, we are always bound to co-presence, as the lonely wanderer in the ending photograph of the essay testifies. In front of the vastness of the sea, we are drawn back to ourselves as social beings by nature and natural beings by sociability (cf. Morin, 1975).
From presence to co-presence, the traces which this essay approach may be read, also, under the perspective of authorship and anthropology of photography, which understands technique whilst a method that questions the paradigm of objectivity in social science. If it is photography which, in this essay, allows approaching human presence within a specific social context, focusing on material culture, it is because photography itself is a trace of presence. The author of photography, the operator of the photographic apparatus does not but transforming his/hers immediate experience into a mediated one (cf. Somaini, 2016). Photography becomes, thus, a medium of perception through which, according to Walter Benjamin (1996a, 1996b), we are able to read the world. This reading it, by itself, a form of making oneself present; it is leaving a mark, a trace, a sign in and of human materiality, as well as a material sign, be it as analogic or digital photography. It is, finally, the affirmation of the impossibility of a definitive and total absence. The trace becomes, thus, that which transforms all presence into a relation of co-presence.
References
BENJAMIN, Walter. On Perception. In: BULLOCK, Marcus & JENNINGS, Michael W. (Eds.), Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926. Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996a, p. 93-96.
BENJAMIN, Walter. Perception is Reading. In: BULLOCK, Marcus & JENNINGS, Michael W. (Eds.), Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-1926. Cambridge; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996b, p. 92.
BENJAMIN, Walter. Imagens do Pensamento. In: Obras Escolhidas II. Rua de Mão Única. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2000.
BLAINEY, Marc G. Groundwork for the Anthropology of Belgium: an overlooked microcosm of Europe. Ethnos, p. 1-30, novembro, 2014. Disponível em: <doi:10.1080/00141844.2014.968180>. Acesso em 14 de janeiro de 2017.
MORIN, Edgar. O Enigma do homem: para uma nova antropologia. Tradução: Fernando Castro Ferro, 1ª. edição, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1975.
RODENBACH, Georges. Bruges-la-Morte. Paris: Flammarion, 1998.
SOMAINI, Antonio. Walter Benjamin's Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat. In: Grey Room. MIT Press Journals, Vol. 62 (inverno), p. 6-41, 2016. Disponível em: <http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00188>. Acesso em 14 de janeiro de 2017
