The Center for Experimental Ethnography Official Launch Party
February 15th 2019
5:00 PM
The event will begin at 5:00 PM with a screening of students' films from Fall 2018 CEE Visiting Fellow, Louis Massiah's Course "Films of Utility". Please join us afterwards in the Upper Egypt Gallery for live music, food and dancing (plus surprise performances).
Sharon Hayes, Associate Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design, is another cherished faculty member affiliated with the CEE. Sharon Hayes engages multiple mediums–video, performance, and installation–in ongoing investigation into specific intersections between history, politics and speech.
Hayes has incorporated existing speeches, recordings, slogans, and songs into her own original work, while addressing themes including love, feminist activism, queer theory, and politics. Her projects examine and interrogate the present political moment as a moment that reaches simultaneously backward and forward; a present moment that is never wholly its own but rather one that is full of multiple past moments and the speculations of multiple futures.
She is currently collaborating with Brooke O’Harra on their project, "Time Passes", a performance to the audio book of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.
Dr. Cox Has Arrived!
Dr. Aimee Meredith Cox will be the visiting fellow for the Center this spring. She will be teaching a course titled, Black Women Moving.
Aimee Meredith Cox is jointly appointed as an Associate Professor in the departments of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University. Cox earned her M.A. and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and B.A. with honors in Anthropology from Vassar College. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Anthropology, Black Studies, and Performance Studies. Cox’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women’s Studies Association. She is the editor of the forthcoming volume, Gender: Space (MacMillan) and co-editor of a special issue of Public: A Journal of Imagining America on art and knowledge production in the academy. Cox is also a former professional dancer. She danced on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem and toured extensively with Ailey II. Her next ethnographic project, Living Past Slow Death, explores the creative protest strategies individuals and communities enact to reclaim Black life in the urban United States.
Student Research Grant
The Center for Experimental Ethnography invites graduate students from across the University to apply for our student summer research grant. The grant is meant to support doctoral, MFA, and professional degree students who are incorporating multi-modal methodological strategies into their ethnographic research. These strategies can encompass film, performance, sound, creative writing, drawing and/or other media. Proposals should outline the broad research questions of the project, the specific methods used to explore them, and the expected broader significance or intervention.
Saturday, February 2nd, 12:00 PM Time Passes funded by the Velocity Fund
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.
Wednesday, March 27, 7:00 PM An Opera of the World directed by Manthia Diawara
Manthia 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.
Manthia Diawara was born in Mali, West Africa. He is a distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Film at New York University. Manthia Diawara is a prolific writer and filmmaker. His essays on art, cinema and politics have appeared in The New Times Magazine, LA Times,Libération, Mediapart and Artforum. He is the author of two acclaimed memoirs and has published several books on African and African American cinema. Diawara’s previous films include Negritude: A Dialogue between Soyinka and Senghor (2016), Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (2010), Maison Tropicale (2008) and RouchIn Reverse (1995).
Friday, February 8th, 7:00 PM Screening: Four Days in May directed by Deborah A. Thomas, Deanne M. Bell, and Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn
This experimental documentary uses archival film and photographs, drone footage and contemporary hyper-realist film photography to explore the 2010 State of Emergency in West Kingston, Jamaica. In May of that year, the military and police entered Tivoli Gardens and surrounding communities by force in order to apprehend a “wanted” citizen. This action resulted in the deaths of at least 75 civilians. The film features community residents talking about what they experienced during the “incursion,” and naming and memorializing loved ones they lost. It encourages viewers to think about how ordinary people negotiate the entanglements among nationalist governments, imperialist practices, and local articulations with illicit international trades.
Monday, March 29th - 31st 7th annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival Hosted by The Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts
The Screening Scholarship Media Festival provides a creative, collaborative space to explore the affordances and challenges of multimodal strategies in research, and to interrogate their social implications. This year’s SSMF aims to create a unique dialogue on multimodal research and a salient hub for experimentation in a broader, domestic, and international stage.
