Filming Food Cultural Practices in Cameroon. An Artistic and Ethnographic Work

Food practices in Cameroon raise the question of the relationships between tradition and modernity, the local and the global, showing how deep, food and culture are embedded in politics, in the multiple power relationships which are scattered throughout everyday life, both in the rural areas of the Grassfields and in the urban space of Douala. These topics are the subject of the film Il faut donner à manger aux gens. Food Cultural Practices in Cameroon made by the artist Paola Anziché and the anthropologist Ivan Bargna, in 2015. This article examines the film construction process. The author analyses his collaboration with the artist on the background of the event of Expo Milan 2015, which provided the occasion for this video: artistic practice and anthropological knowledge (positioning in the field, use of the camera, editing, and distribution of work) are seen in their relationships with the communication costraints related to the event. In this way, the ethnographic field is extended from Cameroon to Milan, while the film is treated as an object always in the making, a form distributed existence, disseminated in time and space