HEADLESSMEN

Driven by a deep curiosity about how people and things are a constitutive part of the same space and the same temporality, this research opens itself to think about materials and matter as inherently alive in order to understand how worlds of practice are made and transformed.
This is a procesual questioning of the assumptions of anthropology, seen from a particular epistemological position and takes form as an ethnographic film, anchored in the knowledge of observational cinema.
This research focuses on the processes that shape up Marcha Gualteriana (Guimarães, Portugal) and on the performativity of its making according to three parts of the body: eye, hand and head.

Facing the material universe produced by Casa da Marcha Gualteriana (PT) - a traditional handcrafts association - through an ontological lens, which challenges the way we see, touch, make, think and act with and through materials and matter, this research aims to contribute to our sustainable positioning within the relational systems we inhabit daily and the places that make them. This type of thinking appears as an attempt to formulate a theoretical concept of a relational and material performativity that considers the forms of human and non-human agency for the social sciences and for other disciplines. Perhaps this way it would be possible to recognize culture and nature, body and materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to theorization of the human as a cause or effect.

This research is therefore a way to continue questioning about places of practice, their things, materials and matter and about the way in which all these things are entangled in people's lives and bodies and vice versa.






Artistic and film direction
Sara Vieira Marques


Script and ethnography
Sara Vieira Marques


Supervision 
Catarina Alves Costa


Co-production
NOVA-FCSH 

Casa da Marcha, Guimarães
november 2021