• Music Video Making: Participatory Ethnography through Making Hopa lide

Petr Nuska

This presentation explores the collaborative making of music videos as both an ethnographic method and expressive form in the documentary Hopa lide (2023), which portrays the lives of Romani musicians in Slovakia. The music videos – co-created with the musicians themselves – stand not as supplementary media but as central outcomes of a participatory research process grounded in long-term fieldwork. Rather than simply documenting musical life, these videos emerged through an exchange of ideas, aesthetics, and social context, with Romani participants directing not only their performances but also visual frames of their own representation. This mode of collaboration reconfigured the researcher-participant dynamic, turning filmmaking into a space for shared authorship.

In this talk, I screen and contextualise excerpts from these music videos to reflect on how they function as cultural statements and tools for reclaiming agency in visual media. Engaging with visual anthropology, ethnomusicology, and critical Romani studies, I consider how music video-making enabled forms of visibility that resist reduction to poverty, marginalisation, or victimhood – dominant frames in mainstream Romani representation. I argue that this process fostered a creative and deeply relational form of ethnography. The musicians used the opportunity to make the music video not only to show who they are but also to imagine who they want to be – musically, socially, and visually. As such, the videos provide insight into how audio-visual co-creation can operate at the intersection of research and activism in minority settings.

*Petr Nuska is a visual ethnomusicologist and ethnographic filmmaker. His passion for capturing music straddles music documentaries and music videos, both guided by commitment to innovation in pursuit of underexplored perspectives on music. Since 2011, he has been involved in projects worldwide in the fields of documentary and ethnographic film, educational and activist videos, and production of music videos with independent musicians. His recently completed doctoral research at Durham University concerned the musicianship of the Roma in central Slovakia. The film “Hopa lide” is his feature-length directorial documentary debut based on long-term research in this locality.

 

• The Land’s Knowledge and Music Education for Warlpiri people from Central Australia

Evelyn Quispe

“We sing really high with the spirit. They always listen. It’s their obligation to look after the Country, and we look after the songlines” (Sims, 2024). Sims conveys how Warlpiri identity, in Central Australia, is grounded in ontological interconnectedness with ngurrara (sentient land/Country/home) (Munn, 1973; Strehlow, 1968; Berndt, 1970). This interconnectedness, known as Jukurrpa, the Ancestral Present (Dussart, 2000), embeds societal laws and knowledge in ceremonial songs and their narrative stories (Curran, 2020). Today, there is an impetus in telling the stories to young Warlpiri; however, ceremonial songs transmission faces serious endangerment (Curran et al. 2024). 

Given the space to discuss music as culture (Merriam, 1977) and its social politics, I analyse the interconnectedness of the ceremonial songs and their narrative story constituents (Ellis, 1985; Barwick et al., 2013; Curran et al., 2024). I argue that senior Warlpiri people teach narrative stories providing a framework for effective transmission of songs, clear pedagogical goals and methods for contemporary contexts. First, I describe a cyclical framework of speech and music used by Warlpiri women when singing songs, arguing this framework assists in solidifying associated meanings of song and in revisiting memory. Second, I present multimodal teaching of yawulyu (women’s ceremonial songs) with singing, dancing and body painting, arguing that meanings of stories are learnt through embodied participation as essential for learning singing.To conclude, Warlpiri people are developing clear pedagogical pathways for future transmission of songs and stories, based on ‘the land’s knowledge’ (Patrick, 2024) to effectively navigate the contemporary context and respond to the course of song endangerment. 

This paper highlights the competence of Indigenous pedagogies in sustaining endangered music traditions.

*Evelyn Quispe is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. Originally from Bolivia, she holds degrees in Linguistics and Intercultural Bilingual Education from the University Mayor de San Simón. Her academic work spans sociolinguistics and intercultural education. Committed to Indigenous communities, and as a Quechua woman, Evelyn was drawn to the parallels between Warlpiri and Quechua women’s voices. This reinforced her interest in researching Warlpiri ceremonial song transmission and narrative stories in Central Australia. She conducted fieldwork recording knowledgeable Elders teaching their sacred stories and songs, as part of the project Rethinking the Dynamics of Place in Warlpiri Performance, led by Dr. Georgia Curran. Evelyn’s work examines how song and narrative stories intertwine to sustain cultural knowledge and enable contemporary pathways for song transmission.