On October 17th, join colleagues at Annenberg for lunch and a book talk by Alex Fattal, author of Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Columbia. The book explores how the market has become a principal ground for counterinsurgency warfare and the imagination of postconflict futures.
LIMBO | Screening & Artist Talk
On Oct 18th at 4pm, join us for a special screening of Alex Fattal’s experimental ethnography, Limbo, in conversation with the filmmaker. Telling the story of a former guerrilla through a truck transformed into a giant camera obscura, this experimental form illuminates the life in limbo.
QUARANTINE PLAY | Interactive Exhibit Visit
Photo: Listening at Lazaretto (Aislinn Pentecost-Farren)
On Oct. 27th at 2PM, join us on a CEE/CAMRA walk-through of the immersive exhibit, Quarantine Play, curated by Aislinn Pentecost-Farren (Grad Student in UPenn’s School of Design). The exhibit is a walk-through history of the Lazaretto, the first quarantine hospital in the United States, built in 1799, on the ancestral land of the Lenni-Lenape people in Tinicum Township, Pennsylvania. It was Philadelphia’s quarantine station from 1801 - 1895, where staff reviewed the health of all cargo and people arriving to the city. You and a friend will listen to two different but interconnected audio tracks weaving together stories, interviews, historical documents, and instructions for exploring the site.
DEDE I BROUGHT YOU BACK | World Premiere
Photo: Film Detail (Dir. Megan Kroon) Premiering on Sunday Oct. 13 at 2pm at the Penn Museum, Dede I Brought You Back (Dir. Megan Kroon, 2018) showcases a special story about bi-cultural life and the sense of disconnect that inevitably follows. The film follows Dede, a 19-year-old first-generation Chinese-Canadian. She’s spent most of her life in Toronto, Canada, but her mom, LiuYe, brings her back to the small village in China where Dede’s grandparents were born. Together, they wrestle with the question, “What is my duty to family and legacy?” while they sift through family relics and visit ancestral graves.
Month in Review
3RD THURSDAY | September Launch
On Sep. 19th, scholars, students, and members of the public joined together for the first of CEE's monthly lunch gatherings (held on the 3rd Thursday of each month). Attendees enjoyed chaat and lassi alongside creative project-building conversations. This month, Aislinn Pentecost-Farren joined us from Penn Design to jumpstart a conversation about interactive exhibition design.
Photo: 3rd Thursday lunch (AM Jordan)
THE NEIGHBOR BEFORE THE HOUSE | Shaina Anand
Photo: Shaina Anand describes her work as co-founder of CAMP (AM Jordan)
On September 24 we were delighted to host filmmaker and artist Shaina Anand for a lecture, screening and discussion of her project “The Neighbor Before the House”, which follows eight Palestinian families living in and around Jerusalem city as they look out into their neighborhoods using CCTV cameras mounted on the rooftops of their home. Anand's feature-film is part of a long body of experimental works by CAMP, a Mumbai based studio that Anand co-founded with Ashok Sukumaran in 2007.
HOSTILE TERRAIN: 94 | Jason de León
Photo: Audience Q&A during Luncheon with Jason de León and curatorial team (AM Jordan)
In September, we co-sponsored a film screening, panel discussion, and pop-up exhibit of Jason de León’s (UCLA) cutting-edge anthropological work. Held at the Penn Museum, the interactive "Hostile Terrain: 94" exhibit brought together participants from Penn and from across Pennsylvania to handwrite thousands of toe tags which were then placed on a map, each one representing a human body recovered from the migrant trail. Audiences were also treated to a free and public screening of his film Border South, which combines ethnography and cinema-verité to explore the harsh environment and brutal journey of undocumented immigrants from Central America into the United States.
GEOSOCIAL ENCOUNTERS | Slought
Photo: Audience Q&A during Geosocial Encounters Panel (Ben Mendelsohn)
On Sept. 19 & 20th, the Geosocial Encounters symposium and film series connected documentary artists with researchers and scholar-filmmakers in the environmental humanities. Attendees and participants explored how video art, experimental documentary, and sensory ethnography can inform the practice of critical urban, spatial, and environmental research, as well as shining light on the ways that scholar-filmmakers utilize these audiovisual tools and contribute to these genres of film and video art.
MAKING SWEET TEA
| A CAMRA Film Making a Splash
The first feature-length documentary film produced by CAMRA, in association with the Annenberg School for Communication, premiered last Monday at the Reeling Film Festival. Through the voices and stories of seven men it explores what it means to be black and gay in the South. The film is co-produced and directed by Annenberg Dean John L. Jackson Jr. and doctoral student and Director of CAMRA Nora Gross.
ENDING NOV 20
| Submit to SSMF
Now calling for submissions! The 8th Annual SSMF will be held on March 27th-28th, 2020 at the University of Pennsylvania and is a hybrid of a film/media festival and an academic conference. We invite submissions from scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers, and educators of all backgrounds that creatively explore the theme of “Rupture and Repair.” The submission system will be open until November 20, 2019.
EL DIFICIL ARTE DE MIGRAR | Annenberg
Photo Credit: Annenberg
Running through Winter 2019 at Annenberg Center, El Dificil Arte de Migrar shares the stories of the Latinx immigrant community who teach and learn together at CCATE, the Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Educación, in Norristown, Pennsylvania. Artwork address members’ hopes and dreams, their experiences of border-crossing, and lived struggles before and after coming to the United States.
COMING DEC 2
| Ernst Karel & Veronika Kusumaryati
Save the date for a presentation by CEE Visiting Scholar Ernst Karel in collaboration with Veronika Kusumaryati on December 2nd at 5:30.
This presentation looks at archival location recordings as part of Robert Gardner’s “Harvard-Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea” in 1961. Stay tuned for more information in November's newsletter!
