CUSAS: Santi Migranti: Film Screening and Q&A with Prof. Magnus Course

Prof. Magnus Course, who is joining virtually, will provide a brief introduction to the film. We will watch the film, Santi Migranti, together and have subsequent Q&A with Professor Course. 

Film Runtime: 24 minutes

Synopsis: By drawing a parallel between the lives of saints and the lives of contemporary migrants, Massimo Pastore's public art project Santi Migranti poses a visual challenge to growing anti-migrant sentiment in Naples and beyond. These evocative images of patron saints wearing the golden isothermal blankets of maritime rescue have appeared overnight on the walls of many Italian cities. Utilizing the visual grammar of popular Catholic iconography, these images remind viewers that saints have also been migrants. Shot by a trio of anthropologists – Magnus Course, Rishabh Raghavan and Capucine Tournilhac – this documentary traces not only the aesthetic experience of encountering Pastore's images on the street, but also the lives and opinions of the migrants who have acted as his models in an increasingly hostile environment.

You can view the Santi Migranti exhibition online here: ​​http://www.massimopastore.com/portfolio_page/santi-migranti/

Biography: Dr Magnus Course is Head of Social Anthropology and Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. His research is concerned with the relations between kinship, personhood, power, language and religion. He completed his PhD on kinship and personhood among the Mapuche of southern Chile at the London School of Economics in 2005, and the ensuing monograph was published by University of Illinois Press in 2011 as Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile. He is the author of many academic articles on a variety of topics, as well as two edited collections, one (with Suzanne Oakdale) on indigenous autobiographies in lowland South America, the other (with Maya Mayblin) on new anthropological approaches to sacrifice. He recently started new research exploring changing attitudes to death and the afterlife in Naples. 

He is the co-producer of two films exploring the role of the sea in the Scottish Gaelic imagination––the award-winning short film Muir ar n-Aithreachean and the BBC/Creative Scotland funded feature-length television documentary Iorram–and one film on art activism in Naples, Santi Migranti (with Rishabh Raghavan and Capucine Tournilhac). His latest research is on the material and social traces of Purgatory throughout Europe for a book-length project provisionally entitled Leaving Purgatory: the Afterlives of an Afterlife.

For more information, contact cusas@socanth.cam.ac.uk