Ensimismarse, or, the doorstep, the neighbours, the roof…

Multi-channel moving image / HD Video / 2019 
13 minutes  
Collaboration with anthropologist Martin Holbraad / Commissioned by UCL, London / Exhibited as part of 'Morphologies of Invisible Agents', spacestudios, London, UK

The Spanish word ensimismarse connotes an inward move that is active: freely translated, ‘to in-oneselfify oneself’.

Borrowing this word to describe the feeling of a self-reflexive reverie, the multi-channel video installation, ensimismarse… explore spaces of social relations in Cuba, in the context of the country’s project of state-socialist revolution. Maru lives in a tenement flat, her family scrambled together like so many eggs, whilst Lasaro lives alone in a turn-of-the-century building that has no roof. Using diagrams, both of them attempt to describe the choreography of bodies and spaces, from the inside looking out. Meanwhile a recording of Havana’s Camera Obscura provides an external diagram of the city, from the outside looking in.

Morphologies of Invisible Agents explores the relationship between the invisible and its tangible realisations in contexts of acute political change: from rampant capitalism, neoliberal reform and austerity to protest and revolution.

The exhibition is the outcome of the Social Morphologies Research Unit’s (SMRU) long-term dialogue between artists and anthropologists, mediated by their shared use of diagrams as catalysts for thinking and doing social change. Collaborating pairs of artists and anthropologists use as their point of departure the shifting social tensions they detect in an array of settings: Shi’a rituals in Iran, revolutionary change in Libya and Cuba, the slashing of welfare in the UK, and more. Delving into the hidden dynamics of these social morphologies, the collaborating pairs present a series of speculative works that deploy diagrams and diagrammatics as not merely explanatory machines but as exploratory investigations to allow invisible agents to be sensed.

The Social Morphologies Research Unit is based in the Anthropology Department and the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London and is an offshoot of Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics (CARP).