Welcome to our 2025-26 Visiting Fellow, Prof Roger Canals Vilageliu – Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona
Roger Canals Vilageliu is a Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona (UB). He is currently the PI of the ERC-Consolidator project ‘Visual Trust. Reliability, accountability, and forgery in scientific, religious and social images’ (2021-2026). Specialist in Visual Anthropology, he is the author of many articles as well as of the books including A Goddess in Motion (2017) and The Image that Never Ends. A Journey through Visual Anthropology (forthcoming). As a filmmaker, he has made several internationally awarded films like “A Goddess in Motion” (2016) and “Chasing Shadows” (2019). In 2016, he received the Fejos Fellowship for Ethnographic Film from the Wenner-Gren Foundation of New York.
Visual Trust. An ERC project on ethics, images, and visual experimentation
In this talk, I will present the key principles and preliminary findings of the ERC project, ‘Visual Trust’. Reliability, accountability and forgery in scientific, religious and social images (2021-2027, PI: Roger Canals). This comparative project aims to investigate, through visual and experimental methods, how individuals from different socio-cultural milieus relate to and through images in terms of trust and mistrust. The project brings together a variety of images, including photojournalistic pictures, digital fakes, religious icons, AI-generated images, astronomical images and medical imaging. The session will include a screening of some of the project’s visual outcomes. I will also provide definitions of key project concepts such as ‘visual trust’, ‘eclectic assemblage’ and ‘visual assessment’.
How to film “visual trust”? A practical and methodological approach
In this session, I will share some theoretical and methodological reflections on how to conduct experimental research cinema about “visual trust”. To do so, I will introduce the principle of “studying images through images” and I will comment on the importance to critically connect theoretical approaches with practical, aesthetic, and ethical choices. To illustrate these debates, I will screen some fragments of some of the films made within the ERC project VISUAL TRUST. I will also show the first cut of the on-going film A Matter of Facts, that I co-direct with the anthropologist and filmmaker Mihai Andrei Leaha. This film aims at exploring how visual disinformation works in contexts of electoral processes marked by logics of polarization and of raise of the extreme right.
