Alienable gesture

Abstract

This article explores one dimension of gestures' mediation through ethnographic research with Berlin-based auteur animation filmmakers. In positioning gestures as extricable from embodied and environmental contexts, my interlocutors flex the aesthetic and critical potential of what I call gestural alienability. To understand how these artists de- and recontextualize bodily movements, I engage linguistic anthropological writings on gesture and contextualization. Drawing on 2 years of participant observation and conversation, I propose that such processes of gestural alienation underpin the critical (yet unpredictable) potential of mediated gestures to creatively index contexts beyond the immediate or self-evident. Although I focus on auteur animation filmmaking in Berlin as a sharp, reflexive articulation of gestural alienability, the concept has broader salience with respect to the reenactment and (re)mediation of gestures across sites, moments, and materialities.