Reclaiming Narratives: Exploring indigenous concepts and transformative agency through film restitution and found footage film production

• Applicant: Dr. Sophia Thubauville
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555247283

In the current decolonial and postcolonial debates within cultural heritage institutions, European archives are also increasingly focussing on the restitution of films due to their extensive collections from the Global South (Sarr & Savoy 2019; Ohene-Asah 2022; Campanini, Cheeka & Hediger 2021). At the same time, scholars and artists are making innovative interventions in film archives and adopting practices such as found footage filming, in which old film material is reassembled to create new narratives that challenge notions of authorship, provenance and historical context (Fossati 2012; Groo 2012; Knopf 2018; Gaycken 2021). In art theory, there are numerous studies on the interaction between artworks and viewers, with socio-material approaches emphasising the reciprocal relationship between objects and the networks in which they exist (Gell 1998; Hennion 1989; DeNora 2000). In addition, anthropology has developed methods that incorporate indigenous concepts non-reductively and comparatively, allowing for reconceptualisation through indigenous metaphysical and ontological perspectives (Wagner 1975; Strathern 1988; Viveiros de Castro 2002). The scholars recognise the epistemological and political implications of this methodology as a decolonial movement in anthropology. The research project will explore the epistemological and ethnographic potential of found footage films within a transdisciplinary framework that combines film restitution, found footage film production and ethnological fieldwork. This opens up new epistemological perspectives for ethnological research with found footage films. Methodologically, the project is based on research in the archives of the Frobenius Institute and film analysis using computer-aided methods. In addition, the researchers will carry out shared observation screenings of the film material with the indigenous communities to investigate film and media reception. The project will focus on the production of found footage films by indigenous filmmakers based on ethnographic film collections of the Frobenius Institute, which were shot between 1950 and 1974 in the Sidaama and Gedeo regions of Ethiopia. Through artist residencies, researchers and indigenous filmmakers will focus on the interplay between new ontologies and historical sources to challenge the primacy of the original ethnographic author/film as a source of knowledge and explore memory construction based on archival material. By participating in these residencies, researchers will collect ethnographic data on the socio-material aspects of film production and the relationships mediated by found footage film production within indigenous communities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants