treatment: ailment (artistic afterlives of fieldwork and its possibilities)
Venue
Seminar Room 4, Chrystal Macmillan Building,The University of Edinburgh, 15a George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LD
Description
ABSTRACT
This presentation contextualises and reproduces a lecture-performance given as part of an artist residency at the biennial conference of the European Association of the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH), held in Oslo in 2023.
At EAHMH 2023, I invoked two decades of my historical and anthropological research on disease control and scientific research in Nigeria and Cameroon, and on health systems and development in Africa and Southeast Asia – on moments of crisis in personal, institutional, and national histories of health and wellbeing – in a series of exhibited pieces, a performance, and a workshop. The residency elements were encountered in central conference spaces, and dramatised researcher relations with archives of medical and humanitarian responses to crises. In the performance, I interacted with prepared video, textual, and photographic material available in the exhibition, to consider relations between narrative and historical meaning-making. In today's presentation, I will seek to extend this to interrogate anthropological modes of knowing through archives.
BIO
John Manton is an Irish artist based in Oxford, UK. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University. He has worked as a historian and anthropologist of global health, most recently at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, carrying out archival and field work in Nigeria, Cameroon, The Philippines, and Malaysia, and co-editing a collective art/anthropology book, Traces of the future: an archaeology of medical science in Africa (Intellect, 2016). He was artist in residence at the European Association of the History of Medicine and Health biennial conference held in Oslo in 2023, previously ran a programme on Civic Matter: Infrastructure in sense and resonance, at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, and has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions the UK, Norway, and Mexico.
This is an in-person event. Please note that this event may be recorded. The recording will be used for internal University of Edinburgh teaching purposes only.