JUAN CASTRILLÓN

Juan Castrillón is the Gilbert Seldes Multimodal Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on analytics of listening, world-building practices, and contemporary healing arts in Anatolia, Turkey; the Northwest Amazon in Colombia; and Philadelphia. He creates experimental ethnography as a performative response to contemporary debates in the academy. He uses filmmaking to develop a cinematic language that is respectful of Indigenous perspectives but also open to contemporary debates on gender and critical race theory. Castrillón’s work has been published in academic journals, and exhibited at film festivals, art galleries, and academic conferences around the world. He is board member of the Society for the Anthropology in Lowland South America, and member of the Center for Research and Collaboration in the Indigenous Americas, and the Substantial Motion Research Network. He received his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology with a Graduate Certificate in Experimental Ethnography from the University of Pennsylvania. Find more information on the films' virtual premiere HERE

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Rehavi presents a watch that appears indifferent, as something that only acquires value through circulation, exchange and listening. From a more political dimension, it poses a statement about how Sufi music and Turk-Ottoman arts are been promoted and celebrated by the current Turkish government. That is, featuring an abandoned yet cherished object in Istanbul’s outskirts able to assemble the pace of personal interiorities and the constant transformation of Turkish society. Rehavi is a meta-commentary about the meaningfulness of Turkish Sufi music that is constantly lost and reassembled. Even though Rehavi was shot and produced during a fieldwork season in Istanbul during 2016, it is hardly an ethnographic film. It is a piece of experimental ethnography in which current debates in the humanities such as the object-oriented ontologies and aural perspectivism acquire a creative, and performative role. Instead of documenting or representing the reality of Turkish musicians and artists, the film renders the matters of concern of their everyday practices, opening the room to the multiple meanings these practices might have.

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~Kiraiñia  Whose voice is telling a story when reported speech and masked sounds are the norm within certain communication ideologies? ~Kiraiñia (Long Flutes) is a film that came out from multimodal research in Northwest Amazon. From its scholarship approach, the film breaks with the factual perspective of ethnomusicological films about instruments, opening a cinematic dialogue informed by Emi-Hehenewa nonlinear linking and storytelling. This film renders the resilience of the Cubeo Emi-Hehenewa community to assemble emotion and memory out of ritual and expressive practices after been prohibited and pulled them apart by Catholic and Protestant missionaries during the mid-nineteen fifties in the Vaupés region, Northwest Amazon. In its essayistic gesture, the film puts together broken pieces of the everyday shared by an ethnomusicologist and an indigenous community in their common attempt to remember and retell how ~Kiraiñia long flutes sound like. The film aims to re-pair the multilingual, perspectival and thought-provoking exchange between indigenous and non-indigenous audiences, rendering a cinematic language that is respectful of indigenous standpoints, and also open to contemporary debates akin to hybrid audiences.