This dissertation – in the form of a visual ethnography – takes on the subject of a communal squatting experiment in a rural Spanish mountain valley. It investigates existing relations between non-humans and the human search for different forms of autonomy. The investigation has a double aim. The first is to understand how, beyond proprietary models, living both in the mountain and with it leaves room for the agency of the habitat’s non-humans. The second is to study the way in which creating a distance from the state and the market allows those non humans to be integrated into the social world.

This project is part of a particular conception of the relationship between art, research and social transformation, in which aesthetics, theory and politics are inseparably intertwined. Film is to be understood here neither as a tool for capturing a given reality nor for illustrating theoretical thought. It is, rather, an experimental space allowing for a better grasp of the dynamics of the actors, and so enters directly into the very process of research. The audio-visual practice, then, is considered both as a research tool and a means of contributing to the creation of the world that it studies. Through the reflexive act at its heart, it can render that world more comprehensible.

Biography

Agathe Nieto holds a master’s degree in Anthropological and Documentary Cinema (University of Paris-Nanterre) and Creative Documentary (Lussas School/ École de Lussas). She is currently working on a research-creation-action dissertation at the EUR ArTeC University Research School under the direction of Anne Sauvagnargues and Emmanuel Grimaud.

PROJECT TEAM

Under the direction of Anne Sauvagnargues and Emmanuel Grimaud