ON THE ETHNOLOGY CINEMA PROJECT

« When nobody wanted my work anymore, I thought of myself then as a disappearing tribe, or as a member of one disappearing tribe, I went looking for other disappearing tribes. » In 1982, Charlemagne Palestine founded the Ethnology Cinema Project, a New York-based non-profit organization dedicated to collecting and preserving audiovisual material that documented disappearing traditional cultures from all over the world. The project ran for about three years. Recently unearthed, Retour à nos racines was shot by the artist in France in 1989 with similar intentions.