About Fictive Kin
Fictive Kin, is an ethnographic study of a local music festival and its participants. It is an inquiry into the relationship between individuals who are not blood relatives but have chosen to bond. The archive that is created from the music festival photographs, video, interviews, and other audio recordings are used to demonstrate how the kinship is defined, and how it is maintained.
28 black and white photos from Campfire Jam accompany audio and video collected from the festival, notation of the event’s theme song, and a map of the festival grounds. The video is a narration of the festival’s history by one of its organizers. Selected audio is arranged in a mash-up that immerses the viewer in the collective experience.
The archive explores the recontexualization of culture as it is documented. I have continued to be greatly affected by Buren’s “The Function of the Studio”, and other post-studio commentary, such as Becker’s “Art Worlds,” de la Fuente’s “New Sociology of Art,” and Douglas Crimp’s “On the Museum’s Ruins.” I have found good counsel from those who focus on collection and archive, including Baldessari and Benjamin. I have been greatly influenced by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the everyday, including the power of natural cycles to break artificial ones.
I continue to explore questions of the relationship between the individual and society, and how cultural meaning is created within, between and amongst the two. Fictive Kin attempts to explore the problem of artistic representation of the individual in ethnographic studies without crossing ethical lines of privacy, through iconic photographs, interview and an audio mash-up. Additionally, the archive questions the emotive and affective meaning of the relationships and attempts to capture how the greater collective conscious creates transcendent art from the practices of daily life.
