Moving global horizons: Imagining selfhood, mobility and futurities through creative practice in ethnographic research

This article explores imagined selfhood, mobility and futurities through creative practice in ethnography. Globalisation allows people with varying socio-economic and geographical backgrounds to imagine themselves with more possibilities. How can creative practice such as improvisation in ethnofictions, storytelling and participatory animation be applied in ethnographic research to explore the imaginary realm of selfhood and expectations on being elsewhere? Drawing on fieldwork on migration from Africa to Europe, Brazilian transgender mobility and British youth in environmental transformation, the article will show how existential immobility inspires production of global horizons through imagination.

Rouch's following ethnofiction Moi, un noir (1958) would show darker sides of labour migration in West Africa. Oumarou Ganda and his fellow protagonists took on roles from popular francophone culture to express not only their dreams of a better life but also their bitterness in relation to the colonial authorities. Stuck in the immobility of labour migration, the participants would dream up a future together.
The two following examples from the films by Sjöberg represent situations when the participants of the fieldwork were imagining mobility but had not yet attempted to realise their dreams. Ethnofiction was used as an ethnographic method to gain access to the imaginary aspect of mobility in both cases. In the fall of 2006, towards the end of the production of the ethnofiction Transfiction after nearly one and a half year of fieldwork research and filmmaking among transgendered Brazilians in São Paulo, one of the main protagonists Savana 'Bibi' Meirelles was asked to express her own dreams about the future. In the interview preparing for the filmed improvisation, she explained her wish to go to Paris in France. Bibi's main motivation was that she wanted to escape the poverty and discrimination she experienced as a transsexual (male to female) sex worker in São Paulo, Brazil (Sjöberg, 2010). But the dream of going to Paris was also motivated by a process of self-realisation. Bibi would meet a French man that she could marry and share a comfortable life with. She envisioned herself as another person in Paris, in a glamourous context where she finally would be allowed to become the woman she had always dreamt of being. Bibi was not the only transgendered sex worker in Brazil that dreamt about Europe. The Latin American vision of Europe originates from a colonial heritage. Europe represented power and a better quality of life. This heritage has been adopted by many transgendered sex workers in Brazil. For them, Paris represented the epitome of glamour illustrated by the word 'chic'. The sex-trafficking of transgendered sex workers going from Brazil to Europe is a lucrative business and provides a possibility for young transgendered people to earn money and to realise their gender and sexuality in a more tolerant context. After earning money in Europe, they would be able to afford plastic surgery that could make their bodies more feminine and allow them to buy a car or a flat where they could work 2 Photo by Eric Brochu more securely (Sjöberg, 2011).
The actual reality of the many young transgendered Brazilians suffering from the harsh consequences of sex trafficking was however ignored in these shared visions of a better life in Europe. These idealised images remained untainted in spite of the many reports of exploitation and violence in the European sex trade.
In Transfiction, Bibi expresses this through the projective improvisations of her character Zilda that complains over the difficult situation of transgendered sex workers in Brazil.
For Bibi, Zilda provided an opportunity to be the glamourous woman she dreamt of becoming. And while Bibi is forced to stay and struggle in Brazil, her imaginary character Zilda meets a French man in São Paulo that asks her to go and live with him in Paris. They walk hand in hand through the streets of São Paulo in spite of people staring at them and eventually travel to Paris where Zilda supposedly lives happily ever after. In this context, migration is not only driven by a wish for a 'good life' (Fischer, 2014), but also as part of the continuous process of crafting selfhood.  The outcome of the ethnofiction and ethno science fiction research projects, hints on how co-creative practices based on projective improvisation can provide access to the imaginary realm of migration. Bibi never made it to Paris and James has not left for LA, yet… but the projective improvisations in the above films suggest how the vision of the self in other places and the successful return, form powerful driving forces behind mobility. Migration is preceded by the crafting of selfhood by imagining the self in other places. The persona of the imagined self, living in Paris or LA, co-exists with the current perceived self, to spark self-realisation and hope. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty and twentytwo-year-old James respectively exist in dialogue with his imaginary rock star self in LA; so does Bibi with glamorous and happily married Zilda in Paris. Imagination 'anticipates and previews, views, serves action, draws before us the configuration of the realizable before it can be realized' and '[…] facilitates our practical domination over the real' (Starobinski, 1970, p. 173-174, quoted in Crapanzano, 2004. The process of imagining selfhood in other places becomes the dress rehearsal for migration and stays relevant even if it never actually happens. The crafting of self in other places contributes to our creation and understanding of ourselves regardless if we ever leave.

Imagined Pasts and Futures in It Was Tomorrow
In order to explore and capture how the experience of crossing borders affects the participants' imagination and forms their subjectivities, D'Onofrio realised a co-creative ethnographic documentary drawing on participatory animation as part of her doctoral research in anthropology, media and performance.
As Rouch, D'Onofrio intended to document the manifestations of the surreal in the forms of the real, in order to produce what he poetically described as 'a postcard at the service of the imaginary' (Fieschi & Téchiné, 1967, 19). 3 The film traces the moment when an amnesty decreed by the Italian government allowed her research participants to legalize their status after almost ten years had passed from their arrival to Italy from Egypt. At that moment their future was re-inhabited by possibilities. As part of their need to rediscover their dreams and hopes they decided to take the journey back to the first places of arrival, where they disembarked from the boats that had brought them as teenagers to Their relationship to Egypt has been further complicated by the fact that in Italy they often had to endure hardship, loneliness and exploitation at work, without being able to easily return to their families. This reminded them of a place they felt they belonged to, but that at the same time had rejected them and bore the responsibility of their situation.
To their mind, Egypt was the country that denied them a future, a sense of personal and collective trajectory and growth. In Egypt, but also in Italy where these men without documents were confined in the periphery of the world they wished to access, this lack of future is often translated into a sense of great frustration and unfulfillment. By critically analysing the sense of hope, frustration and ambivalence in the Egyptian rural context, Samuli Schielke (2008) gives us a picture of what his interlocutors mean when they say they are bored and desperate for something to happen, for a change to occur in their lives.
Human imagination itself has the ability to contradict reality, allowing space for other possibilities to take hold of the present. In his phenomenological account of imagination, Sartre (1940) notices that the key feature of our imaginative process is the ability of our mind to imagine what is not the case. This aspect vividly emerged out of the animation process where black and white photographs devoid of colour or of actions and emotions that were part of the experience, activated the participants' memory and imagination to tell the story of what was not on the screen, and animate it. This is the expressive potential of imaginative and creative processes such as participatory animation, ethnofiction and other forms of projective improvisation (Sjöberg, 2008). Mahmoud said that the photograph of the reception centre, for example, dragged him right into the situation and helped him imagine what was happening in that place again.

Conclusion
This article has demonstrated how co-creative practices can be applied in ethnographic film and research to provide access to imaginary worlds of mobility. The imaginary realm of cultural meaning has traditionally been neglected in ethnographic research on migration, and mobility in general. The intangible aspects of imagination has made it a difficult research area due to the demand on empirical evidence required during the positivist paradigm of the social sciences. The acceptance of ethnography as an interpretative and intersubjective discipline has however gradually paved the way for the ethnographic film methods described in this article.
The three ethnographic films Transfiction, It Was Tomorrow and Call Me Back all demonstrate how different creative practices inspired by the projective improvisations in Jean Rouch's ethnofictions could be applied to approach different stages of mobility. The example from Transfiction shows how an imaginary selfhood in other places is crafted among transgendered Brazilians as mobility is rehearsed. It Was Tomorrow draws on participatory animation to show how young Egyptian migrants draw on their imagination to understand and make new meanings of their past experiences and futures selves. The scene from Call Me Back invokes the idea of a mobility and prestige from the film Jaguar. A young man from North England expresses is dissatisfaction with his current situation and environment and creates a future self that returns from the US as a worldfamous rock star to save his town and its inhabitants from floods and misery.
Although the imagined mobility in all three films is motivated by dissatisfaction with the current situation, imagination is not merely an escape. In all three examples imagination forms an essential part of the continuous process of crafting selfhood and concrete