The Family of Luis and other films

Slought is pleased to announce The Family of Luis and other films, an evening of film screenings by Laurence Salzmann, followed by a conversation about visual ethnography and its limits. The program will take place at Slought on Friday October 6, 2023 from 6-9pm and will include screening of excerpts from five documentary films set in Latin America, including The Family of Luis, El Rayo, La Lucha/ Tales of the Inca, and Écheleganas / Do Your Best. These screenings will be followed by a public conversation with the artist in dialogue with Jason Francisco, a photographer and essayist at Emory University, and Yolanda Carbajal Zuniga, a Peruvian scholar. The event is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be provided. This is among the first of several events celebrating the gift of Salzmann's archive to the University of Pennsylvania's Kislak Center. An exhibit on his work, "A Life with Others," will be on display at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center until December 4.

The film program will feature images and video that span four countries and six decades, and introduce us to the indigenous Peruvians, Afro-Cuban wrestlers, Mexican farmers and emigrants who whose lives Salzmann sought to document. If they offer an anthropological view into cultures little understood by North Americans, they also testify to Salzmann's relationships with his subjects and his commitment to avoiding didacticism and a documentary aesthetic. Salzmann lived within the communities he depicts in these films for months and at times years, and learned to speak their languages, including Spanish and Quechuan, an indigenous language that has endured since the Incan empire.

Following the screening, Salzmann and his interlocutors, including Yolanda Carbajal Zuniga, an indigenous, Quechuan-speaking collaborator, will explore the challenges of creating art that documents other cultures. How does Salzmann's work both respond to and resist prior historical and anthropological methodologies, which have often reflected a colonizing gaze? How can visual ethnography support and strengthen communities through an ethics of collaboration and a commitment to the preservation of memory and cultural heritage? How can artists prevent the lens of the camera from becoming an instrument of alienation and othering?