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Budhaditya Chattopadhyay will be a visiting artist in CEE Fellow Ernst Karel's Audio Ethnography class on TUESDAY NOV 26TH, 1:30-4:30, and he is opening the class to the public. Location TBD -
The presentation by Indian-born artist and scholar Budhaditya Chattopadhyay delineates the role of sonic ethnography in film and media arts, by introducing a few of Chattopadhyay’s sound works for listening and discussion, as well his forthcoming book The Auditory Setting (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) that investigates how narrative and a sense of place and space are constructed in film and media arts through the recording, reproduction and mediation of location-specific ‘ambience’ or ambient sounds. The term ‘auditory setting’ can be understood as a sonic backdrop or the acoustically mediated space where a story or event can take place. The presentation aims to assess sound’s undervalued role in the setting and its production.
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On Nov 19th, CEE hosted a lunch conversation with Lisa Britton, from Penn's French and Francophone Studies. She spoke on an video/audio that records the story of Moussa SY, a French-Senegalese descendant who, on any given day of the year, will don the uniform of his great-great-grandfather and walk 30 km from his home in Soissons to the memorial sites along the Chemin des Dames. Moussa Sy is a modern griot of sorts, a wandering storyteller eager to engage with those he encounters along his path, promoting the Senegalese perspective on the Great War and strengthening the connections of American-French-and Senegalese people.
Dir. Warwick Thornton (2017) (Australia)
Watch Trailer The Southern Cross is the most famous constellation in the southern hemisphere. Ever since colonisation it’s been claimed, appropriated and hotly-contested for ownership by a radical range of Australian groups. But for Aboriginal people the meaning of this heavenly body is deeply spiritual. And just about completely unknown. For a start, the Southern Cross isn’t even a cross - it’s a totem that’s deeply woven into the spiritual and practical lives of Aboriginal people. One of Australia’s leading film-makers, Warwick Thornton, tackles this fiery subject head-on in this bold, poetic essay-film. We Don’t Need a Map asks questions about where the Southern Cross sits in the Australian psyche. Imbued with Warwick’s cavalier spirit, this is a fun and thought-provoking ride through Australia’s cultural and political landscape. Screening held in Rainey Auditorium at the Penn Museum at 2PM on Nov 10 2019. BLACK FEMINIST CENTERED FORUM ON DISRUPTING SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN PHILADELPHIA
There isn’t a more significant time to lift the courageous, intergenerational, diasporic Black voices in NO! The Rape Documentary, and love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse anthology than now. Fall 2019 marks both the 25th anniversary of the first pre-production meeting for the internationally acclaimed documentary film, NO!, and the forthcoming publication of the love WITH accountability anthology. Each of these works are groundbreaking, prevention resources that unwaveringly center diasporic Black survivors of adult rape and child sexual abuse. To commemorate the convergence of these milestones, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, the award-winning director of the film, and the editor of the anthology, partnered with the University of Pennsylvania, the Just Beginnings Collaborative, Feminist and Gender Studies Program at Colorado College, Scribe Video Center, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Leeway Foundation, and other sponsors/partners to present, #FromNO2Love: Black Feminist Centered Forum on Disrupting Sexual Violence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 31, 2019 - November 1, 2019. This gathering lifted the long-term and new survivor-led work that addresses, disrupts, and works to humanely end child sexual abuse and adult rape in Black and marginalized communities. #FromNO2Love attendees/presenters At Slought in Philadelphia, Alex Fattal presented a preview of a current work in progress and then sat down with CEE Postdoctoral Fellow Alissa Jordan to discuss his experimentations in ethnographic filmmaking with ex-combatants in Columbia.
On October 17th 2019 we joined colleagues at Annenberg for a lunch and a book talk by Alex Fattal, author of Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Columbia. In his talk, Alex Fattal drew from demobilization marketing campaign videos and print advertisement to explore how the market has become a principal ground for counterinsurgency warfare and the imagination of post-conflict futures in Columbia.
Pop-up Exhibition Hosted by Penn MuseumHostile Terrain 94 is a participatory political art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project based at UCLA. The project memorializes and bears witness to the thousands of migrants who have died as a result of Prevention Through Deterrence, the U.S. immigration policy between Mexico and the United States. The pop-up installation at Penn Museum—to be on display September 25th for one day only—will be created by hundreds of people throughout Penn and Philadelphia. Volunteers will meet at various locations to handwrite on toe tags the identifying details of the nearly 3200 people whose bodies have been recovered along the Southern Arizona border since 2000. The time commitment is 30 minutes. The tags are then be placed on a wall map of the Arizona/Mexico border in the exact location where corresponding human remains were found, to be on exhibition in Penn Museum September 25–27, 2019. The event is cosponsored by Penn’s Department of Anthropology, Center for Experimental Ethnography, Cinema and Media Studies Program, Latin American and Latino Studies Program, Penn Provost, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. For those volunteering on MONDAY, September 23:
SCREENING & DISCUSSION WITH SHAINA ANAND In Conversation with Deborah Thomas/ Center for Experimental Ethnography Shaina Anand is a filmmaker and artist who has been working independently in film and video since 2001, and since 2007 as CAMP, a Mumbai-based studio for transdisciplinary media practices, which she co-founded with Ashok Sukumaran. CAMP's provocative, ethnographic work in video and film, electronic media and public art forms over the past decade have shown how deep technical experimentation and artistic form can meet while extracting new qualities and experiences from contemporary life and materials. From their home base in Chuim village, Mumbai they run the online archives https://Pad.ma and https://Indiancine.ma, and the community space R and R, among other activities including their long-running rooftop cinema. Shaina is also founding trustee of The Indian Cinema Foundation and curator of THE NEW MEDIUM, at the Mumbai Film Festival. The Neighbor Before The House Program includes a presentation, screening, and discussion taking place at Slought on Tuesday, September 24, 2019. In the presentation preceding the film, Shaina Anand will explore surveillance systems, critical documentary filmmaking, and community participation, and experimentation. This presentation will be followed by a special screening of Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (The Neighbor Before the House) (60 min, 2011) and a conversation with Deborah Thomas of the Center for Experimental Ethnography. The Neighbor Before the House is a series of video probes by CAMP (Shaina Anand, Ashok Sukumaran, and Nida Ghouse, with Mahmoud Jiddah, Shereen Barakat, and Mahasen Nasser-Eldin) into the landscape of East Jerusalem. The film centers on Eight Palestinian families who use their TV screens to look out into their neighborhood. Shot with a PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) CCTV security camera mounted on the rooftops of their homes, these images show the before and after of instrumental "surveillance." Instead of bearing witness in the usual way, these families control the cameras from their homes, a voice finds an image, an image is probed beneath its surface, and thoughts withdraw or rebound, as Palestinians evaluate the nature of their distance from others. They observe nearby archeological digs, their homes, the West Bank barrier, both near and far settlement activity, and other seemingly mundane aspects of the relentless occupation of East Jerusalem. Inquisitiveness, jest, memory, desire, and doubt pervades the project of watching. At other times, narrative spills out first and the live camera operator seeks an image that might provide evidence.
ECOLOGIES OF DOCUMENTARY RESEARCH AND PRACTICEWhat can video art, experimental documentary, and sensory ethnography teach us about the practice of critical urban, spatial, and environmental research? Conversely, how are scholar-filmmakers utilizing audiovisual tools and contributing to these genres of film and video art? Geosocial Encounters connects documentary artists with researchers and scholar-filmmakers in the environmental humanities. The symposium is co-organized by Dr. Rahul Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Television and New Media Studies, and Dr. Ben Mendelsohn, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. The event will begin with a film screening at Slought the evening of Thursday, September 19 and continue with a series of panels throughout the day on Friday, September 20. Geosocial Encounters a project of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities It is supported by the School of Arts and Sciences and University Research Fund, the Department of English, the Cinema and Media Studies Program(link is external), the Wolf Humanities Center, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, and the Center for Media at Risk. View details here. CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
From 5:00 to 8:00 PM, join the graduate students from ANTH 551 as they exhibit their final projects for Kristina Lyons's course on Experimental Ethnography at the Interfaces of the Arts & Sciences, which forms part of the curriculum for the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Students will be sharing their sound, photo, print, drawing, poetic, narrative, video, and light installations in Classroom 2 of the Penn Museum on Tuesday, April 30th.
he Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) provides a creative, collaborative space to explore the affordances and challenges of multimodal strategies in research, and to interrogate their social implications. SSMF is a hybrid between a traditional academic conference and a film/media festival that fosters the intersection of art and science across disciplines since 2013. Rendering Matters of Concern and Present Histories is the theme of SSMF2019, and scholars, educators, artists, activists, visual legal advocacy and digital humanities groups are welcome to participate.
In 2019, SSMF will feature works rendering matters of concern and the present histories of indigenous people, persons under any form of detention, diasporic communities, LGTB+ collectives, and environments in conflict. Learn more about SSMF here.
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On Wed 27 March 2019, Manthia Diawara screened his film "An Opera of the World" at the Scribe Video Center at 7:00PM. Diawara's film is based on the African opera Bintou Were, a Sahel Opera, which recounts an eternal migration drama. The Bintou Were opera, filmed on location in Bamako, Mali in 2007, serves as a mirror for Diawara to build an aesthetic and reflexive story, through song and dance, about the current and yet timeless drama of migration and the ongoing refugee crises. The success and limits of fusing African and European perspectives are tested by interlacing performances from the Bintou Were opera, past and present archival footage of migrations, classic European arias, and interviews with European and African intellectuals, artists and social activists.
Please join the South Asia Center in welcoming Mathangi Subramanian for a Creative Ethnography Workshop for Students at 12:00 PM on March 25th, followed by a book reading of "A People's History of Heaven" at 5:30 PM at Penn Book Center. She will also be participating in a Book Panel with GSE Faculty on Tuesday, March 26th at 12:00 PM in Silverstein Forum of Stiteler Hall.
Please register for the Creative Ethnography Workshop at southasiacenter.com in honor of Marian Anderson
On Wed Feb 27 2019, Camae Ayewa premiered a new piece at the Arthur Ross Gallery in honor of Marian Anderson, on her birthday. She developed the new work after a period of research conducted in the Anderson archives held by the Kislak Center. Her piece was accompanied by a trio, including a saxophone, vibraphone, and viola. The CEE launch party took place from 5pm till 10pm at the Penn Museum on February 15 2019. Festivities and events began in Widener Auditorium at 5:00pm with a screening of students’ films from McArthur Genius Fellow and Fall 2018 CEE Visiting Fellow Louis Massiah’s Course “Films of Utility” (5:00- 6:30 pm). Then, we went to the Upper Egypt Gallery for refreshments, live music, special performances, and a DJ (6:30 -10:00 pm).
Time Passes is an ongoing collaboration between Brooke O’Harra and Sharon Hayes that takes the audio book of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse as its spine. On February 2, it comes to the Neighborhood House stage! The performance is an 8-hour continuous event with Brooke, Sharon, their kid Alice, and their dog, Cosmos. Interested in “time,” they perform with and through To The Lighthouse in its entirety as a proposal-in-performance to occupy Woolf’s deeply gendered containers of time and thought. O’Harra and Hayes are motivated by the way in which To The Lighthouse embraces landscapes of thought over –or as– action, and take up Woolf’s challenge of form to find a new relationship to live performance.
Held on February 2, 2019 at noon at Christ Church in Philadelphia. Funded by the Velocity Fund Watch the Event Below An Evening with Louis Massiah in Conversation with John L. Jackson, Jr., the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania at the Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum (held 5:30-7:00 pm). The evening featured a screening of Massiah's new work-in-progress, the T.C.B. School of Organizing, a film that presents a biography of Toni Cade Bambara as a primer for social justice. The film catalyzes a conversation about using culture to organize community, and helping young activists to generate sustainable movements for social change. Nov 13th, 2018
Location: ICA, 118 South 36th Street 4:30-6:30 pm "Making Sweat Tea" is a feature documentary from John L. Jackson Jr., E. Patrick Johnson and Nora Gross on the lives and loves of southern black gay men. This event was hosted by CAMRA. Nov 7th, 2018
Scribe Video Center, 3908 Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19104 The School of Social Policy and Practice and the Center for Experimental Ethnography co-presented a screening of The Rape of Recy Taylor directed by Nancy Buirski (USA, 91 mins, 2017). Director Nancy Buirski was present via Skype. The screening of The Rape of Recy Taylor was preceded by When We Came Up Here: Adeline Behline (USA, 2016, 6:06 min) by Tina Morton. This event featured a performance of Samuel Beckett’s rarely seen short plays, including a screening of his one and only film (entitled Film), starring Buster Keaton. These extraordinary, tragicomic short plays – Footfalls, Rough for Theatre I, Come and Go, Catastrophe, and his film Film – are full of humor, darkness, and humanity reduced to its essence. This was an unprecedented collaboration of the Theatre Arts and the Cinema and Media Studies Programs that engaged Beckett’s legacy in two dimensions, live and onscreen. Directed by Dr. Marcia Ferguson November 1, 2018 - November 4, 2018 Location: Bruce Montgomery Theatre A roundtable discussion featuring Peter Galison (History of Science and Physics, Harvard); Laura Kunreuther (Anthropology and Experimental Humanities, Bard); and Louis Massiah (Founder, Scribe Video Center).
An Experimental Ethnography @Penn panel at the Screening Scholarship Media Festival featuring Kurt Orderson (Filmmaker, South Africa), Christen Smith (Anthropologist, UT-Austin), and Quinsy Gario (Performance Artist, Amsterdam).
A Provost's Interdisciplinary Seminar On March 20, 2015, University of Pennsylvania presented The Visual and Performative Ethnography Symposium, which was livestreamed on the global, commons based peer-produced HowlRound TV network. This cross-school interdisciplinary symposium was designed to create a public conversation during which we deliberated several key questions raised by these trends. The past twenty years have witnessed an “ethnographic turn” across the humanities and social sciences, and in professional schools, fine arts and architecture. Whether in business, medicine, or law, photography, sculpture, or performance art, qualitative social science methods have become more common as scholars and practitioners seek insights into the everyday worlds and ideas of those with whom they work. At the same time, contemporary developments in technology have made new representational techniques widely available and familiar, especially to younger generations now moving into academia. These transformations have forced us to confront new questions: How are we thinking about what the digital age means for humanistic, social scientific, and professional inquiry and practice in today’s world? How are we using both old and new technologies to advocate for and work with communities? What tools for research and communication should we offer the next generation of Ph.D. students, and how do we prepare them and others to assess non-text based research? Participants in this event included Regina Austin (UPenn), Herman Beavers (UPenn), Karen Beckman (UPenn), Ruth Behar (University of Michigan), Peter Biella (San Francisco State University), Kesha Fikes (The Center for Sensorial Bodywork and Movement Therapy), Kim Fortun (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Faye Ginsburg (NYU), John Jackson Jr. (UPenn), E. Patrick Johnson (Northwestern University), Annelise Riles (Cornell University), Jesse Shipley (Haverford College), Diana Taylor (New York University), Elmo Terry-Morgan (Brown University), Deborah Thomas (UPenn), Debra Vidali (Emory University). PART 1. OPENING REMARKSClick below to watch the opening remarks with Professor Deborah Thomas, Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania PART II. MULTI MODALITY WORKSHOPIntercession, Multi-Modality Workshop (Led by CAMRA: Sofia Chaparro, Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan) 1) What the “ethnographic turn” means across the disciplines, and how do we think about “visuality” and “performativity” in relation to research generated ethnographically and in collaboration with communities? 2) What role are new technologies (both material and embodied) playing in the research process, and what kinds of archives do they create? 3) How might we institutionalize inter-disciplinary, multi-modal work within the academy in a way that collaborates with community organizations? 4) What standards and evaluative criteria can be established for this kind of work, and how can we translate this approach in a way that makes it legible to others when it comes time for doctoral students to enter the job market or for junior faculty to be promoted? PART III. Institutionalization & InterdisciplinarityWhere do we locate the visual and the performative within the academy? How have scholars positioned in different parts of the academy attempted to institutionalize visual and performative work at their respective universities? What strategies have worked best? What methods were deployed to translate conceptual goals into concrete institutional and administrative support? To what extent have these initiatives been driven by curricular concerns and commitments? How have their respective institutional spaces changed over time, and what strategies allow for the most successful means of incorporating a wide array of faculty, graduate students, and undergrads into the Institute’s orbit? To what extent have “local communities” been engaged through these efforts? Moderator: Herman Beavers (U Penn) Diana Taylor, Hemi (New York U), Elmo Terry-Morgan, Rites and Reasons (Brown U), Faye Ginsburg, Center for Media, History and Culture (New York U)*, Annelise Riles, Anthropology and Law (Cornell U) |
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