Professor-artist and professor-researcher

Abstract

The foundation of the Universidad de las Artes inaugurated access to a public education in arts in Ecuador in 2015. As three professor-artist-researchers who have worked in different periods in this institution, we propose an article with two objectives in mind. First, we aim to share and examine the film-based artistic work that has formed part of our research practice within the university setting (and the experience of making these films in this particular context), including the experimental ethnographic documentary short Sour Lake (Dávila, 2019), the found footage essay film 1922 (Gills, 2023), and the expansive imagework design Dispositivo ORG (Terán Vargas, 2017-2024). Secondly, based on these experiences, we propose to discuss more broadly the entanglements of the professor-artist-researcher role (including how our artistic practice and research interweave with our teaching practice) and to reflect on the potential advantages of experimental filmmaking in the academic context.

Keywords

• experimental ethnography, essay film, found footage, image-work, teaching methods