Ramey’s Film ‘El Signo Vacio’ Honored with Visual Anthropologists Award

Visual and Media Arts Professor Kathryn Ramey’s film El Signo Vacio (The Empty Sign) was awarded the Richard Werbner Award for Visual Ethnography from the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival. 

 “I am very proud of this acknowledgement of my work as anthropology by anthropologists especially given that I am not housed in a conventional anthropology department,” said Ramey.

In the film, Ramey juxtaposes 100 years of archival and found footage from agricultural, propaganda, and tourism films with contemporary depictions of local artists and activists that highlights the complex tensions between democracy and debt, between Caribbean paradise and environmental destruction, between colonial traces and military domination.

“The film asks viewers to sit with the complexity of colonization, its contemporary reiterations, and its durabilities…” wrote the judges for the award.
“We believe that this film and the broader research project that accompanies it demonstrates how anthropologists can engage meaningfully with archival traces and with forms of experimentality and invention that approach ethics and politics not as straightjackets, but rather as a space from which to engage with the complexity of the colonial apparatus.”

The jury said the film illustrates how working with and through images can help produce forms of knowledge that are complex, critical, and reflexive.

“Finally, it demonstrates how experimentality and invention can be points
of departure for reimagining what visual anthropology is, what it can be, and how it can engage audiences within and outside the academy,” wrote the jurors.

Since 2011, anthropologist and filmmaker Richard Werbner has funded an award for films made by academic anthropologists. Films must be a minimum of 40 minutes and based on fieldwork conducted by the filmmaker.

Ramey previously received a Guggenheim Fellows grant to support the making and exhibiting of the film, and received a Creative Capital grant to make the film.