Umanaqtuaq, 2007
DVD, 20 min
In fall 2006, Joanna Malinowska made her journey to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic to follow in the footsteps of Franz Boas, arguably the father of American anthropology, who was one of the first Western scholars to study the Inuit. Traveling to the Arctic nearly 120 years after Boas, Malinowska's Umanaqtuaq presents material documenting her attempt at ethnographic research interviewing the local Inuit musician and Elvis Presley impersonator, Jimmy Ekho. The project is an outcome of very symbiotic relation: Ekho gets a taste of rock star popularity, Malinowska experiences her fantasy of a fieldwork while Elvis functions as a connective tissue between the Inuit musician and Polish artist.