Restoration of a wooden ship recognized as historical maritime treasure by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage. 

It might seem just a video about the restoration of a wooden ship, but the actual subject of this documentary-film is the ecstatic state of mind of its shipwright: an Italian researcher in maritime ethnography who decided to learn boat building skills in order to understand the intangible knowledge hidden behind the construction of a wooden ship.

This film is an experiment in Sensory Ethnography: a combination of aesthetics and ethnography which attempts to bring out an inner dimension that may only with difficulty, if it all, be rendered with propositional prose.

I’m an Italian boatbuilder, filmmaker and independent researcher in cultural anthropology.

My major areas of interest are coastal communities, boatbuiding technology and transmission of knowledge. My research interests focus on maritime cultures of the Indian Ocean from ethnographic and archaeological perspectives. This video is a chapter of my lifelong participant observation fieldwork. 

After graduating in Asian and African Languages and Civilizations I moved to Indonesia where I had a teaching assignment at State University of Jakarta. In those years I carried out a research project in maritime ethnography on living boatbuilding traditions in S-E Asia collecting data on boat types, construction techniques, local response to the introduction of western technology and its social and cultural effects on the maritime communities.

The practical aspects of this fieldwork experience made me realize the limits of my methodology. All those wooden vessels were built "by eye" guided by an intangible knowledge and I considered my "blindness" a problem of epistemological relevance. I felt I couldn't really understand the development of the technology and investigate the transmission of knowledge without acquiring practical boatbuilding skills. Since then much of my time has been spent in boatyards working as apprentice boatbuilder in Tsunami-hit countries, Scandinavia, and the Mediterranean.  

In the last four years I've been working as wooden ship restorer at the maritime museum in Norway. I am also designing an appropriate and versatile technology which attempts to improve traditional boatbuilding. I believe in the potential key role of the boats to eliminate poverty and reduce isolation improving rural access and mobility through the development of rural water transport.

kinoiris