Unpacking the Situated Ethics of Collaborative Video-Making in a Border Context

In the proposed presentation, I aim to discuss situated research ethics of image-making in art therapeutic workshops with asylum-seeking youth living in the refugee camp in Leros. Conducted in a ‘liminal’ setting of forced immobility, collaboration between the facilitator/visual Anthropologist and amongst participants themselves, was not only necessary, but one of the core objectives of the workshops intending to tackle growing racisms amongst different nationalities. Playful engagement was central in both learning and practicing with various visual means, and in facilitating, holding and processing painful individual and collective research engagements with the refugee experience. It also emerged as a core need, since it enhanced our collective resilience in the context of ongoing border violence. The value of outcomes was never prioritised, but emerged as a result of expressive visual research and participants’ own desire to communicate their experience(s) ‘with the world’. Humanitarian ‘ethics’ often had to be side-lined, for example, the prohibition of touching. The collective circle sharing how we feel while holding hands one-off trust exercise turned into a grounding ritual in the process, and the need to metabolise the void created after a number of participants were relocated, led the group in an engaged session with traditional dances from our varying cultural backgrounds, all requiring holding each other. While love and solidarity emerged overtime, the attributes that facilitated it were engrained in honesty, presence and respect set collectively from the very beginning, and in constant dialectical improvisation during it, with evolving participant needs and situational constraints continuously re-shaping its direction. Unpacking these, and other examples from the interactive evolution of this therapy-centred research engagement, I intend to discern the qualities that made this project feel collaborative for all parts involved, hoping to inform experimentations with the ethics of trust and mutual exchange, in other research contexts.