Leïla Baracchini holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Art Theory from the University of Neuchâtel and the EHESS. Her researches focus on the commodification of culture and identity, on the work of mediation and translation involved in the making of contemporary indigenous arts and on the issues inherent to developing an anthropological expression about the expression of Others in a postcolonial context. Her doctoral thesis on the making of Contemporary San Art in Botswana was rewarded with the thesis prize of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac 2019. From 2012 to 2014, she was part of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Iconic Criticism—the power and meaning of images (Basel). Since 2015, she works with archaeologists, geographers, historians and geologues in Guadeloupe on rock art heritage. She co-curated the exhibition Kuru. L’art d’un monde en mutation together with the Jardin botanique de Neuchâtel and the room Artists for the semi-permanent exhibition L’impermanence des choses at the Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel. She collaborated several times with art galleries.

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Her interests are for projects that explore encounters between art and anthropology and that elaborate, through collaborations, alternative and creative ways of seeing and accounting ethnographical experiences in contexts structured by unequal power/knowledge relationships. She aims to further investigate the different facets of our contributions, as anthropologists, outside academia and to reflect on the possibilities and constraints, the bringing-in and limits, but also the tensions and contradictions that can arise from it, in order to look critically at ways to better share information with the general public and to build knowledge creation processes that can transform the world.

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Email: leila.baracchini@bluewin.ch