The presentation will discuss a collaboration between The Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm and Robert Willim in 2014. The aim was to raise new ideas on museum imaginaries and representation. The result was the audiovisual performance Possible Worlds by Willim. Material from the museum was combined with sound and images collected on trips to different parts of the world. The result became a play with temporalities, place and performativity.

In the performance recordings from early ethnographic expeditions are enmeshed with material from entirely different contexts. Mundane everyday things collide with devotional objects, with undefined landscapes and actions as well as the non-place sounds from electronic circuits. The material is mixed through live improvisation during a 30 minute performance.

Possible Worlds is an attempt to explore notions of ethnographic surrealism and the interplay between evocation of worlds and situated performance. The notion of surrealism is here used in an expanded sense, and draws on James Clifford’s (1981) statement about ethnographic surrealism as a utopian construct and a statement at once about past and future possibilities for cultural analysis.