Reaching for the horizon: Exploring existential possibilities of migration and movement within the past-present-future through participatory animation

This chapter focuses on participatory animation as a practice towards new anthropological directions of envisioning and working with people’s, and not only migrants’, life stories, which need to encompass future and conditional tenses as much as they do the present and the past. It argues that animation brings an innovative contribution to ordinary ethnographic practices and representations as it creatively engages with people’s imaginative possibilities that often lie beyond our grasp. Thus, the animated film can become the very method that can help us identify and represent particular kinds of experience and perceptions, which do not find adequate expression elsewhere. The photograph, printed in black and white to allow the contrast of the colored animation to emerge further, was attached to the interior side of the glass frame providing in transparency a constant reference to Ali’s drawings.

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