Alienable gesture

Abstract This article explores one dimension of gestures' mediation through ethnographic research with Berlin‐based auteur animation filmmakers. In positioning gestures as extricable from embodied and environmental contexts, my interlocutors flex the aesthetic and critical potential of what I call gestural alienability . To understand how these artists de‐ and recontextualize bodily movements, I engage linguistic anthropological writings on gesture and contextualization. Drawing on 2 years of participant observation and conversation, I propose that such processes of gestural alienation underpin the critical (yet unpredictable) potential of mediated gestures to creatively index contexts beyond the immediate or self‐evident. Although I focus on auteur animation filmmaking in Berlin as a sharp, reflexive articulation of gestural alienability, the concept has broader salience with respect to the reenactment and (re)mediation of gestures across sites, moments, and materialities.