To be not to be a participatory document of/in the project Urban Boundaries

Abstract

We present the documentary produced in the ethnographic research project "Urban Boundaries: the dynamics of cultural encounters in Community Education" (FU), in which two local communities of Costa da Caparica, Portugal - a fishing community and a multicultural community in a clandestine neighborhood - and an interdisciplinary academic community, comprising researchers from university and non-university institutions, as well as independent academics and artists. Critical ethnography was the methodology adopted in the project, by which the active participation of all social actors is reinforced, implicated in a process of intentional change. In the documentary produced throughout the project we assume the heterogeneity of languages, genres, times, voices and sensibilities, in a process of creative freedom and permanent reflexivity. We write a brief history of the process of its realization and production / edition, in order to reflect critically on some options that we have identified around several interpenetrating questions: 1) epistemological and methodological issues; 2) political issues; 3) ethical issues; 4) aesthetic and technical issues. Based on critical and emancipatory perspective, as a philosophical and epistemological foundation, where all knowledge has an equal place, guided by an ethics of responsibility and re-connection and by a poetics and policy of democratic participation and decentralized multiplicity, we were concerned with creating a production with technical and aesthetic qualities, integrating diverse forms and discourses, crossing heterogeneous, scientific, political and artistic logics. Finally, we identify clues for future work, thus assuming an open process that is constantly rethinking, critically analyzing its limits and expanding into new possibilities.

Keywords

• participatory documentary
• critical ethnography
• relational creativity
• ethics of responsibility and reconnection.