A regola d’arte, an experience of reflexive visual anthropology

Thanks to the initiative by the Cremona's Municipality to nominate traditional violin making in Cremona for the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, between 2010 and 2012 I had the opportunity yo put together three different kind of video documents on violin-making craftsmanship in Cremona. The first one was mostly research footage; the second one was the UNESCO nomination video; the last piece consisted in an articulated documentation of the Cremona violinmakers' skills and knowledge. It was a real challenge, since the dimension of violin making is completely intangible and deeply rooted in a thick net of relations and organizations. As a first step in my fieldwork, I did my own shooting, whereas I worked in collaboration with Lorenzo Pizzi (Terra d'ombra s.r.l.) in the other two projects. This collaboration has been essential. We shared our intentions and integrated our competences in every step of the job: from documentation to editing. In order for the skills and knowledge of this craftsmen and the deep involvement of their mind and body to fully emerge, we developed a reflexive format, using delayed observation and sharing our video research as much as possible with violinmakers themselves. In this way, video recording was not a medium of objectification but rather became a tool of investigation.