Ethnography of No Place
A collaborative video art project by Saya Woolfalk and Rachel Lears
Ethnography of No Place (2008, 30 m) is a series of video works that document an imaginary world. Constructed from household materials (fabrics, sounds, gestures), the characters and stories evoke travel narratives, science fiction and the rhetoric of anthropology to rework tropes of sexual, racial, and gender difference. Inspired by the historical interconnections between anthropology and art, the piece invites reflection upon the utopian dimensions of both disciplines’ desire to make otherness knowable through visual representation and display.
Birds of Passage
A documentary by Rachel Lears
Birds of Passage (2010, 52 m) presents a lyrical journey through the everyday lives of two young Uruguayan songwriters. Ernesto and Yisela have moved to the capital, leaving behind their respective hometowns on the borders of Brazil and Argentina. After many years of composing songs that reflect their origins, both decide to explore new horizons and each seeks to fulfill the dream of recording a first album. While Yisela struggles to reconcile the emerging possibilities of a career in Uruguay with her plans to move to Argentina, Ernesto confronts personal conflicts that threaten to sabotage his creative passion. The film fuses the arts of documentary film and music, interweaving the songs and stories of these two young composers. With vérité cinematography and an unforgettable soundtrack, Birds of Passage explores the challenges of being a young artist, and the art of searching, inside and outside of oneself.
Between Two Monsters
Popular Music, Visual Media and the Rise of Global Indie in 21st Century Uruguay
A doctoral dissertation in Cultural Anthropology at New York University (2012)
This project focuses ethnographically upon the first generation of young Uruguayan artists to come of age alongside digital media, tracing the role of music in the “post-liberal”1 terrain of Latin American politics today; the social practices through which cultural producers in the Global South position themselves within broad transnational fields; and the effects of digital multimedia upon epistemologies of musical knowledge. Investigating how these artists negotiate political subjectivity, cultural memory, and collective identification, I explore relationships between popular music and visual culture, and among creative activity, cultural policy, and political economy. My work presents popular music as a uniquely rich site for the critical analysis of the changing relationships between aesthetics and politics in the contemporary world, in light of the particular social, political and economic stakes in Uruguay¬— a context that dramatizes the fragmentation of identity through exile and migration, the changing character of citizenship in the wake of military dictatorship, and the legacies of history in the imagination of cultural futures.
Os Postiços
Os Postiços is a tropicalist garage band that reinterprets vintage Latin American styles through classic and original songs. With Rob Christiansen (Here Come the Warm Jets Live, East Ghost West Ghost). Recordings and shows coming soon.
The Mystery Keys
The Mystery Keys is the band that has been playing and recording my original songs with a variety of different musicians based in New York City and Montevideo, Uruguay since 2006. Band website coming soon; to listen click here.
© 2012 Rachel Lears + Projects