The Sexuality of the Uncontacted on a Video Tape

The Sexuality of the Uncontacted on a Video Tape (2022), a panel held at Cambridge University (UK), CRASSH, Indigenous Studies in The United Kingdom and Europe Discussion Group, concerns the visualities of sexualities of Indigenous insular people. Since the late nineteenth century, ethnography, photography, and then video, have structured a visual exploitation of what in the eyes of Western explorers was considered hostile, perverse, and nudity to be tamed, creating imaginaries, erotic exoticism, and data deemed scientific. A form of study aimed at creating sexual peripheralities in territorial peripheralities, such as oceanic islands. What culture and morality assimilates hostility with sexuality? In particular, a footage recorded in 1998 at North Sentinel (Andaman Islands, India), and analyzed by Vishvajit Pandya (2009), whose natives are still coonsidered as uncontacted, and preserved by Indian authorities as such, but spotted by British settlers, then anthropologists, and finally illegal tourism, shows one of the few approaches to the island. Coconuts are thrown from the boat, some natives pick them up, others perform sexual gestures considered by Indian authorities to be obscene, and a way of defending themselves. A critical question arises here: in 1998 how can the North Sentinel indigenous people, deemed unaltered by Western and Central Indian sexual-related cultures and morals, perform purposefully hostile sexual gestures? Here It is analized the notion of sexual diversity in those who study native peoples in oceanic islands, with the aim of defusing the hostility-sexuality pair.

Technical Detail
Video Projection + Panel

Exhibitions/Panels/Publications
Panel at at Cambridge University (UK), CRASSH, at Indigenous Studies in The United Kingdom and Europe Discussion Group, 2022.