koštana banović

Among Houses and the Cosmos
(60 minutes, 2016)

Among houses and the Cosmos is a sensuous meditation on people, their living spaces and beliefs, about the human necessity to impose meaningful patterns on life and being. An assemblage of multiple narratives that researches as well as experientially evokes the intensified moments of daily life and the ritual.


Download:
Text by Dr. M.P.J. van de Port
Anthropologist Professor of Popular Religiosity VU University Amsterdam
Among Houses and the Cosmos_MattijsvdPort.pdf


Among Houses and the Cosmos is a sensuous meditation on people, their living spaces and beliefs. The video footage was taken over a period of ten years, during my travels from Europe across Africa to Latin America.

This journey is an assemblage of multiple narratives in a non-linear structure that sets across national boundaries and continents, a poetics of dwelling that researches as well as experientially evokes the intensified moments of daily life and its celebration, and the ritual. My personal history of diaspora has lead me to be intrigued by how ‘other others’ go about their culture in the societies where they are a guest; where they are sometimes discriminated against or rejected, and always made to change. In the form of rituals I see the opportunity to negotiate the distance between my self and the other. The body and the senses become activated and a space beyond language opens up, wherein encounters occur. The voices in Among Houses and the Cosmos are intricately interwoven threads of culture, power, politics, and history. It speaks about the construction of identity, formed in relation to the other in social dynamics revolving ritual, religion, other forms of knowledge and communication with the Self, the Other and a transcendental. It provokes critical questions about the way of being-in-the-world, occupying time, and re-gaining autonomy of life. A personal ritual as a protest against accelerationalism and capitalism, a politics of everyday life.