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Curatorship is both a kind of cultural practice that is widespread throughout the world and a specific job related to recent changes affecting the contemporary art world, cultures, and societies. Today curatorship has become a model for a cultural economy in which diversity, creativity, and participation are essential for the innovation demanded by globalized competition. The focus often shifts from curating objects and collections to curating people. It is on this basis that art curators try to include anthropological ethnography among their work tools and anthropologists rethink their fieldwork practices. Curatorship is an extensive range of disseminated social practices embedded into the daily lives of people, as well as a new perspective through which to focus past and present community curatorial practices differently, re-mediating diverse kinds of knowledge and expertise.

Il testo si proporne di indagare alcune delle implicazioni sociali del progetto artistico di Stefano Boccalini a partire dalla nozione di "traduzione culturale”, interrogandosi su ciò che accade quando saperi e lingue lontane fra loro e da noi, si incontrano in una valle alpina. Parole intraducibili che tuttavia convergono nell’affermare quelle che sono le dimensioni fondamentali della socialità umana e non solo. Abbandonando ogni ’illusione di immediatezza e trasparenza (così come ogni vagheggiamento nostalgico per paradisi perduti), l’artista appare dedito a un paziente lavoro di ricucitura che non annulla le distanze ma le rende transitabili: che cosa avviene di una certa costellazione di significati quando passa da un contesto culturale a un altro, dall’oralità alla scrittura, dalla parola all’immagine, da un materiale a un altro, dall’artigianalità all’arte? Che cosa è possibile mettere in comune e che cosa si perde, si aggiunge o rimane inaccessibile in questo lavoro partecipativo di tra-duzione?

Audio-visual media are a powerful vehicle of globalization engaged in the creation of widespread mediascapes shaping the imagination and the feelings of the people all around the world. As a consequence the audio-visual media are not only a means of anthropological research but a constituent part of the ethnographic field as well.It was in this perspective that in 2009 I asked the Italian artistic collective of Alterazioni Video to accompany me to the Bamileke chiefdom of Bandjoun (Cameroon), where I usually conduct my research. The main topic of our work was fear, an emotion we investigated by filming some traditional masquerades of secret societies (which also made use of some Hollywood-inspired masks) and by making a horror movie with a local cast, using the set and the backstage as an ethnographic field. The vampires and the zombies who were the subject of the film form a part of a shared global imagery but they are also an invisible, effective presence in local sorcery practices. We have tried to stay on the border between facts and fictions, feelings and actors’ performances, as well as art and anthropology, but also to question it, in order to test the way in which anthropology and artistic activism could find a meeting point on the terrain of ethnographic practice. Les médias audiovisuels sont un puissant véhicule de mondialisation, agissant par la création de paysages médiatiques très répandus qui modèlent l’imagination et les émotions des personnes dans le monde entier. Par conséquent les médias audiovisuels ne sont pas simplement un outil de la recherche anthropologique, mais ils sont aussi bien une partie constitutive du terrain ethnographique.C’est dans cette perspective, qu’en 2009, j’ai demandé au collectif artistique italien de Alterazioni Video de m’accompagner au Cameroun, à la chefferie bamiléké de Bandjoun, où je mène mes recherches depuis des années. Le sujet principal de notre travail a été la peur, une émotion sur laquelle nous avons enquêté en filmant les danses masquées des sociétés coutumières (qui utilisaient aussi des masques inspirés de Hollywood) en tournant un film d’horreur avec des acteurs non professionnels recrutés au village et en utilisant le plateau de tournage et les coulisses comme terrain ethnographique. Les zombies et les vampires, qui étaient le sujet du film, font partie d’un imaginaire global partagé, mais ils sont aussi une présence invisible et réelle dans les pratiques locales de la sorcellerie. Nous avons essayé de travailler à la frontière entre les faits et les fictions, les émotions et les performances des acteurs, l’art et l’anthropologie, tout en cherchant en même temps à la questionner, pour explorer les façons à travers lesquelles l’anthropologie et l’activisme artistique peuvent trouver une zone de contact sur le terrain de la pratique ethnographique.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nexus between modernity and secularisation by means of an analysis of contemporary African artistic expressions. In particular I am going to discuss this topic with reference to my fieldwork concerning the rebuilding of the ‘Happiness hut’ (bung die) of the Bamileke chiefdom in Bandjoun, Cameroon.