Meet the SPRING Fellows

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Our rescheduled "Meet the Fellows" event will take place on Friday, February 23rd, bringing together artist Ernesto Pujol and filmmaker Ra'anan Alexandrowicz in conversation with interim CEE Director Dr. Kristina Lyons about their courses and their plan for the semester.

While at Penn, Ra'anan is teaching an urgent course, "One Land, Two Cinemas" where participants function as a research team exploring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through historical facts and their cinematic representations.

In Ernesto's course, "Ethnography of Vulnerability" students will use readings, discussions, and an immersive spring break field trip to Puerto Rico hosted by a queer farming collective to engage with the instructor's approach to ethnographic vulnerability and/as a multi-disciplinary social choreography process.We are delighted to welcome our new Spring 2024 Fellows Ernesto Pujol and Ra'anan Alexandrowicz.

ERNESTO PUJOL

Ernesto Pujol is a multi-disciplinary queer maker who conceptualizes & curates group performances as social choreography; designs native edible horticultural spaces of historical memory for collective healing; and generates creative critical writing and transformative field education workshops. Pujol's complex projects result from trust-based ethical collaborations with gatekeepers & stakeholders in communities across the globe. Pujol believes the creative tools of ecologically and socially-engaged cultural producers are more relevant than ever within increasingly diverse impoverished societies seeking sustainability in the Post-Democratic Age of Extinction. Through grounded psychic acuity, Ernesto portrays the human condition's ongoing desire for transcendence in the face of human rights violations & climate crisis. Ernesto counteracts the cult of speed and the culture of spectacle by revisiting emblematic architecture and mythical landscapes through contemplative presence. These public interventions have consisted in full-immersion environments and repetitive cartographic walks with menus of minimal gestures, from slowness to stillness, all shrouded in silence for deep listening to encourage the awakening of consciousness. Ernesto Pujol is the author of Sited Body, Public Visions (2012) and Walking Art Practice (2018). Artist interviews & essays are found in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail (Vulnerability as Critical Self-Knowledge, 2013), Fernweh: A Travelling Curators’ Project (An Atlas of Small Places, 2015), and Awake: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (2004). 

What if we could practice a radical ethnography of vulnerability because we believe that truly democratized, ethical engagement requires the unconditional vulnerability of the ethnographer: the relinquishing of all academic, professional, and project power bullying through a humble transparency and personal permeability that immediately triggers trust by de-enshrining the intellectual, by bravely including the emotional and spiritual life of the empathic ethnographer.

Most of reality is invisible; the deeper communal paths are psychic. I am a veteran, multi-disciplinary social choreographer who has intuitively employed ethnographic tools and strategies for the past 30 years, collectively producing transformative performative portraits of threatened communities. For this graduate and undergraduate seniors workshop, I wish to invite students into my field process, in terms of my readings and roamings through the world.

The workshop experience will culminate in a field trip to San Juan under the auspices of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, to visit historic colonial sites and contemporary model projects such as El Departamento de la Comida, a queer farming collective. Travel over the week of spring break is required for our course, with airfare, in-country travel, room and board covered completely for all students (thanks to generous support from the Padeia program).

RA'ANAN ALEXANDROWICZ

Ra'anan Alexandrowicz is an Israeli filmmaker and screenwriter currently living in Philadelphia . Some of his achievments include  the Grand Jury Award at Sundance and a Peabody award for his experimental documentaries that deal with the violence, ethical suspensions, and military, legal, and visual frameworks underlying the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (and the treatment of Palestinians in Israel). Films include The Inner Tour, The Law in These Parts and The Viewing Booth.

 While a fellow at CEE and in light of the devastating events in Palestine / Israel, Ra'anan's seminar will pivot to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through cinematic reflection. The course, featuring film screenings of Israeli and Palestinian works, will delve into key historical periods in the conflict to foster a more nuanced understanding of the present. It will use cinema as a lens to study the century-long war and critically assess the role of audio-visual media in historical narratives. The main goals are to provide students with nuanced knowledge about the history of the conflict and create an inclusive space that allows an open and honest dialog about facts and events -  as well as an inquiry into the very language we use to speak of them. Using the history of both Israeli and Palestinian cinemas as a vehicle to study history of the  conflict itself provides an engaging way to look into the two peoples and the century long war between them, but also an opportunity to critically look at the positive and negative roles of the audio-visual medium in the context of historical narratives and events. 

The seminar will be structured as collaborative research in which the class, functioning as a research team, will explore both the historical facts and the cinematic representations of these facts. Provoked by films and clips we screen; we aspire to familiarize ourselves with the roots of the conflict, learn the facts about key events; deconstruct and evaluate narratives and myths that enable it and address the core questions that it raises.

At the same time, we will study and scrutinize the cinematic representation of the historical events and ask ourselves if cinema is a reflection of the painful reality of the conflict or one of the drivers of it? Was it used to create myths or rather to undo them, or did both? The outcome of the course will be a collectively written paper about Israeli and Palestinian Cinema to which each student will contribute a chapter.