Who we are and what we can achieve together
Balz and André are close friends and met in Cameroon in 2005: Balz had travelled from Switzerland for his first research trip. André grew up in Cameroon. Since then, the Cameroonian journalist, political scientist and songwriter and the Swiss artist, media anthropologist and filmmaker have brought together art, science, and friendship to stand in for humanity across national borders.
With you, we can make their current work – consisting of a musical album, a dissertation film montage, and a dissertation thesis – accessible through open science in order to set a long-lasting standart for future research.
Join a scientific community that
• opposes binary logical knowledge systems with new forms of knowledge production that transcend the paradigm of extraction.
• despite all economic and political concerns, places people and their dignity and freedom at the core of their work and guarantees its members equal ownership rights to their research material and the work contained therein.
• in order to ensure all of this, it established a para-institutional platform in 2000 and has been continuously developing it ever since in exchange with various universities and institutions from the cultural sector; because structural challenges require structural solutions (see links to E 3600 scientific artworks at the bottom of this website).
About the current work
Balz and André have been working on their current project since 2011—more than a decade!
At the time, André traveled to Europe as a politically engaged reggae musician, and Balz had the privilege of accompanying him with his camera. In return, Balz participated in the production of André’s music album, «SEPHIRROOTS.» The album features original compositions and lyrics that reflect his experiences between Africa and Europe, and vice versa. It also criticizes the political systems in place in Cameroon and France.
In 2014, André’s mother passed away, which brought him back to Cameroon until 2016. Balz accompanied him with his camera, and the two released the maxi-single «AU NOM DU CHEF» in 2015. Later André also renarrates his experiences of returning to his native country in his first novel: Le Journal de ton Enterrement (2024).
In 2017, Balz invited André into a setting he coined as a cinematographic laboratory, screening back to him some of the video footage he had shot. It was a geometrically designed setting in which André encountered his reflection from previous years on camera. Again depicted on camera, this process gave rise to the thesis film «MOI, UN AFROPÉEN.»
«MOI, UN AFROPÉEN» is not an ethnographic film, but the outcome of an experimental cinematographic research process which, as part of Balz’s thesis entitled «GLAUBEN-MACHEN-LASSEN,» led to a process of cinematographic reflection.
The E3600 scientific artworks association allows the author/Balz and co-author/André to own equal shares not only of the data, i.e., all the film sources, but also of all the work they contain—a novelty in social science and ethnographic research.
-
When Balz successfully defended his thesis at the University of Basel in 2021, the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH) committed to modeling the entire video archive with André and Balz and publishing their work on the Swiss National Science Foundation’s servers as a contribution to open science.
DaSCH took some time to program a video player, which delayed the publication originally planned for 2022 until now: the common work with DaSCH will start at the end of 2025/beginning of 2026.
Simultaneously we are taking advantage of this momentum to publish André’s complete album «SEPHIRROOTS,» which is in a way the soundtrack to «MOI, UN AFROPEEN,» as well as the extension of the maxi-single «AU, NOM DU CHEF» released in Cameroon in 2015.
«MOI, UN AFROPEEN» bears witness to how OTU BALA JAH (André’s former stage name) ultimately let JAH die in order to now appear as André Ottou—under his real name—making music, writing books, and publishing scientific studies.
With your support, you are helping to...
• publish the dissertation film montage «MOI, UN AFROPÉEN» together with the dissertation thesis «GLAUBEN-MACHEN-LASSEN – Cinematography as a Medium in Religion and Religious Studies – using the example of the digital cinematographic experiment ’Moi, un Afropéen’» on the website of the Swiss National Service and Data Centre for Humanities (www.dasch.swiss).
• equip the DaSCH website with the necessary guinea pig to continue making transmedia research contributions publicly accessible through extraordinarily designed front ends in the future and thus set a new standard in media anthropology and beyond.
• consolidate the emergence of an association advocating for transdisciplinary research and providing legal structures that secure the property rights to transmedia research contributions for all participants and protect them from misuse by humans and machines.
• conceive the cinematographic laboratory as a technical setting and geometric arrangement to reveal how the I/EYE positions itself in relation to its (self)image and to be protected as intellectual property.
• release André’s musical album «SEPHIROOTS»—with personal and political lyrics talking about what it is like to live in between Cameroon, France, Denmark, and Switzerland and how we can promote and nourish human creative power—on all major streaming services.
• show that friendship is a fundamental condition for art, humanities, and social science, as it nourishes the courage to explore transcultural exchange on «equal grounds.»
• encourage other researchers to open up new trajectories on their individual journeys through the emergence of a community ready to focus on a common and simple ideal.
• make Swiss human sciences a pioneer of transdisciplinary and transmedia research and thus a refuge for humanity.
–
The collected money will be used to…
• incorporate hyperlinks to the video montage into the dissertation and to have the music used in the montage, by Boards of Canada, to which E 3600 has no rights, re-composed and integrate the final foreword, proofreading, and layout into the dissertation.
• work together with DaSCH to develop the technical data model for embedding the film montage on the website and to ensure data transfer.
• clarify the legal ownership conditions of the published material with DaSCH and protect it from misuse by humans and machines.
• maintain the website of E3600scientificartworks and the front end for the publication on the DaSCH/SNF Servers.
• release the full album «SEPHIRROOTS» on popular streaming services and final cut the «AU NOM DU CHEF» clip, ready to go on YouTube.
• to finance public relations work for the release, as well as to partially refinance the work not yet paid for in the filming of Balz and André.
A 1001 thanks for your support—it would be a pleasure to welcome you to one of our events as well. Best regards, Johanna, Balz, and André