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Oct 19th 1pm Third Thursday

9/29/2023

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BE HOLDING // DIR BY BROOKE O'HARRA

9/28/2023

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Be Holding -- 2023 Philadelphia from Brooke O'Harra on Vimeo.

WATCH ON VIMEO
We are excited to present an asynchronous virtual screening of  Be Holding, an original performance created by a team of professional artists in collaboration with students at Girard College. It transforms
Ross Gay's award-winning poem of the same name into a multidisciplinary, site-specific experience that combines poetry, music, choreography, and video.

Inspired by Philadelphia 76ers basketball legend "Dr." and his iconic baseline scoop in the 1980 NBA Finals, Be Holding wonders how the imagination, or how our looking, might make us, or bring us, closer to each other. How our looking might make us reach for each other.
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And might make us be reaching for eachother. 

And how that reaching might be something like joy.

Produced by Girard College, a tuition-free boarding school for underserved youth that was at the center of Philadelphia's civil rights movement, Be Holding opens the school's historic campus to the city and fosters conversation on social justice issues that continue to impact its majority Black population today.

Over two years of on-campus residencies, students collaborated with the acclaimed team of professional artists to study the themes of the work, explore how these artistic disciplines interact, and gain hands-on experience in developing a pertormance for the stage.
Be Holding is staged at center court in The Cheesman A. Herrick
Fieldhouse & Armory at Girard College in Philadelphia, PA.

Major support for Be Holding has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from The MAP Fund, which is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and Mellon Foundation.


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Stephanie Saldana

9/11/2023

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Please join us for book talk and conversation with the talented scholar, journalist, and poet Stephanie Saldaña. Stephanie will share from her new book What We Remember Will Be Saved.

When: September 19th 4-5:30 pm
Where: Widener Lecture Hall, Penn Museum

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CEE FALL CALENDAR!

9/6/2023

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Save the dates and check back here soon for more info soon. links and information to all events will be populated closer to the dates. SEE YOU THERE! 
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Third Thursday: Meet the new fall 2023 fellows

9/5/2023

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Meet the new CEE Fall Fellows ! Join us on September 21st at 12 Noon to meet Jennifer Harge and Sosena Solomon and hear about their respective work.
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Reckoning & Repair: Producing an Arts-Based Podcast in Philly

6/1/2023

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July 12 | NOON at PAFA

​A conversation at PAFA, student-creators of the CEE "Reckoning and Repair" podcast reflect on relationships, deep listening, and the role of artists as activists and critics. How do artists and organizers in Philadelphia confront the troubling histories of Empire in their midst?  Is it even possible for colonially-based art institutions to meaningfully reckon with their own exclusionary histories? What models of reckoning and repair already exist in Philadelphia's art worlds?

Panel speakers are: Katleho Kano Shoro, Chrislyn Laurie Larore, Adrianna Brusie, Anya Martin and Alissa M Jordan
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CARNIVAL!!

4/27/2023

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MAY 1 2023

PENN MUSEUM

Join us on May 1, 2023 for  12 hours of revelry, performance, screenings,  and conversation in celebration of our fifth anniversary. Events kick off with a live performance of Primo Maggio, with  screenings, performances, and treats throughout. Chill out in a relaxation installation,  hear from Afghanistan's most prominent media makers in exile (in a conversation led by Wazhmah Osman), hear from Amitav Ghosh, participate in multiple soundings with Imani Uzuri, watch a drag performance by Cookie D'orio, dance to late night beats from DJ Reezy, and so much more!


10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Primo Maggio Anarchico
Steven Feld
Trust Your Moves Choir

Trust Your Moves Choir guided by Steven Feld at the Main Entrance Upstairs Landing.

10:45 AM - 11:15 AM
Suture Self in the Garden Disco
Emily Carris Duncan
A relaxation installation with lush textiles, plants, and music will provide the backdrop for a conversation about the quilt as an intimate textile that fosters rest, safety, and joy.

11:15 AM - 11:30 AM
Soundings I
Imani Uzuri
Soundings in the Chinese Rotunda

​11:45 AM - 12:30 PM
Creating Future Countrysides and Future Cities`
Damani Partridge
Jenny Chio

Creating Future Countrysides and Future Cities: Portraits, Collaborations, and Non-Citizens in the Post-Industrial Present. A discussion about different forms of portraiture, which will include some ...

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Lunch and Screening of Mexican Psychotic
Ricardo Bracho
A screening of Ricardo Bracho's completed Mexican Psychotic video along with the videos made by students in his surrealism class (Widener Hall)

2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
A Conversation on Institutional Decolonizing
Wayne Modest
James Claiborne
A discussion about institutional decolonizing with Wayne Modest and James Claiborne.

2:45 PM - 3:30 PM
Ethnography of No Place Screening (Directed by Saya Woolfalk and Rachel Lears)
CAMRA Discussants
A screening of an early film collaboration by Saya Woolfalk and Rachel Lears, followed by a multi-modal response developed by members of CAMRA (Widener Hall)

3:30 PM - 3:45 PM
Soundings II
Imani Uzuri
Soundings procession from Widener to Mosaic Gallery Outdoor Space, led by Imani Uzuri

3:45 PM - 4:00 PM
Horn to Horn
Steven Feld
A listening session to a collaboration with honking horn truck drivers in Accra (Africa Gallery)


4:00 PM - 4:15 PM
Tea/Coffee

Mosaic Gallery Coffee & Snack


4:15 PM - 5:30 PM
Media in Exile/The Embodiment of Displacement
Wazhmah Osman
Roya Sadat
Najiba Ayubi
Sanjah Sohail

A panel discussion with screenings with well-known Afghan media makers in exile.

5:30 PM - 6:15 PM
doomsday: a lecture demonstration
Christina Knight
Jessi Knight

6:30 PM - 7:15 PM
Place, Space, Time, Dance: Getting from Here to There
Louis Massiah
Reggie Wilson

Screenings and a discussion about what we get and take away from the value a place/space holds/shares, about how we move over time and space, and about whether or not this changes (Rainey)

7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Dinner & Jungle-Nama
Amitav Ghosh
Brooke O'Harra
Screening of clips from 'Retold' Documentary and Discussion (Widener Hall)

9:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Drag Performance by Cookie D'iorio/Bearded Ladies
Cookie D'iorio
Bearded Ladies

10:00 PM - 12:00 AM (+1 day)
DJ and Dancing

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Third Thursday

4/7/2023

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For our April Third Thursday event, artist and visual anthropologist Kara Mshinda (Tyler School of Art and Architecture) presents artwork from her current project All Hands Hold and discusses the relationship between art practice, visual narratives, and ethnography in conversation with Grace Sanders Johnson
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"Sex Nice But Di AIDS Ting"

3/2/2023

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A Black Transnational Ethnography of HIV/AIDS, Reproduction, & Dancehall in Neocolonial Jamaica

DR. JALLICIA ALICIA JOLLY

MARCH 30 @ 4:30 PM  | MAX KADE SEMINAR 329A

This talk frames Jallicia Jolly’s articulation of a Black transnational feminist ethnography of HIV/AIDS and reproduction. Jolly discusses how this methodological and epistemological practice displaces the dominant knowledge about Black women’s sexuality, young women’s reproductive capacities, and HIV and AIDS, thus rewriting colonial scripting of black female sexuality as well as humanitarian and biomedical portrayals of women's experiences. She explores dancehall - a soundtrack of fraught possibility of Black women’s erotic and political lives - as an extant arena through which young Jamaican women redefine historic racist and sexist stereotypes of urban working-class women as non-political actors, while contesting the heteronormative narratives of Black female pathology and the boundaries of exclusionary citizenship.  Drawing from an intersectional ethnography of Jamaica women’s grassroots HIV/AIDS organizing, this talk illustrates how women’s multi-  layered narratives and embodied experiences make way for alternative, expansive, and authentic visions of identity, politics, and community for multiply marginalized Caribbean
subjects existing at the margins.

dr. JALLICIA ALICIA JOLLY

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Dr. Jallicia Jolly is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College.  A 2022 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow based at Yale University, Dr. Jolly researches and teaches on Black women’s health, political leadership, and reproductive justice; the transnational politics of gender, structural racism, sexuality, class, and health; intersectionality and HIV/AIDS; and Black, Caribbean, and transnational feminisms. Dr. Jolly's first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS, under contract with the University of California Press, is an ethnography of the reproductive justice organizing of young Black Jamaican women living with HIV that chronicles how the politics of HIV care and self-making meet in their everyday confrontations with illness, reproductive violence, and inequality in neocolonial Jamaica.
Dr. Jolly connects her research to tailored community interventions that advance equity, systemic change & community-building within and beyond U.S. borders. She is appointed as a Visiting Research faculty by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at the Yale School of Public Health to the Research Education Institute for Diverse Scholars (REIDS). A public scholar committed to political action, Dr. Jolly co-leads Birth Equity & Justice Massachusetts (BEJMA), a reproductive justice coalition that aims to advance maternal health equity in policy and to improve the health outcomes of Black and Brown birthing people. Her public writing, which merges her community-based work on black politics, women's health, and political leadership in the United States and the Caribbean, has appeared in The Washington Post/The Lily, USA Today, Jamaica Gleaner, Ms. Magazine, and Huffington Post. Dr. Jolly's work has been published in American Quarterly, The Lancet, Feminist Anthropology, Souls, and Journal of General Internal Medicine and has received support from the Ford Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, the American Association of University Women, MIT, and Blue
Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.
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SSMF 2023! WORKS IN PROGRESS

3/2/2023

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STAY TUNED FOR REGISTRATION DETAILS!

MARCH 31 - APRIL 2 | HYBRID

As we return our embodied selves to institutions, as we encounter the “new normal” that feels frighteningly and tirelessly old, the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA) invites you to the 2023 Screening Scholarship Media Festival, works in progress. We hope to realize a vibrant in-person festival (with a companion virtual program) that reflects and extends on the provocations, lessons and interventions of SSMF 2020/21, Rupture and Repair, and SSMF 2022, PAUSE that asked what it meant/means to be and to make in crisis, to survive and live into collapse.

Our programmatic vision is guided by Denise Ferreira Da Silva who in the essay “Invisible\Obliterating” asks, “[so] what is left after critique, after naming, explaining, demanding, protesting, and burning? What is left for us to do? Can art open a way into, through, across, and then beyond the naturalising gestures that feed the forces of representation?” We offer 
works in progress as a way to think together about how creative practice can contribute to a liberatory future after critique, after naming and explaining, and where we as scholars, educators, students, artists, activists, and the communities and institutions we inhabit land in that imagination. We are led to ask: 

How do different modes and forms contend with unfinishability, with mistakes, with imperfection, in creative work and daily life? What is afforded by sharing imperfectly? / Where does our critical emphasis lie when we know we are engaging with something that is unfinished? What practices of gathering and engagement as spectators and makers do we forge "after critique"? / What are the necessary conditions for an emphasis on process and unfinished work? / What can creative practice that is necessarily in a state of flux give to the making of a more liberatory future? / What are the sensory attunements that makers, and spectators, develop in the encounter with creative work that are useful in interpersonal relationships and social, cultural and political engagements that stretch beyond the moment and space of such encounter? / What is creativity in work, what is creativity at work? Where is our work taking us? What work do we need to do to get to the place of our becoming?

We imagine works in progress expansively and the program includes AUDIO / EXHIBITS & INSTALLATIONS / PERFORMANCES / RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS / VIDEO & FILMS / WORKSHOPS that engage the theme and/or the questions we lay out above.

SSMF 2023 will take place in person at the University of Pennsylvania. The Screening Scholarship Media Festival 2023 is produced in collaboration and with the support of the Annenberg School for Communications, the Graduate School of Education, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. 


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MARCH THIRD THURSDAY: WORKS IN PROGRESS

3/2/2023

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MARCH 16 @ NOON | VIRTUAL CONVERSATION

For our March Third Thursday event in 2023, Rabani Garg and Larissa Johnson and Indivar Jonnalagadda join in conversation about  the upcoming Screening Scholarship and Media Festival, open March 31 through April 2! They will discuss the theme of "Works in Progress" and the ways that the programmatic vision has been guided by Denise Ferreira Da Silva who in the essay “Invisible\Obliterating” asks, “[so] what is left after critique, after naming, explaining, demanding, protesting, and burning? What is left for us to do? Can art open a way into, through, across, and then beyond the naturalising gestures that feed the forces of representation?”  Works in progress as a way to think together about how creative practice can contribute to a liberatory future after critique, after naming and explaining, and where we as scholars, educators, students, artists, activists, and the communities and institutions we inhabit land in that imagination.
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Reckoning & Repair: The Art That's Touched Philadelphia

3/2/2023

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MARCH 1  |  STREAMING ON ALL PLATFORMS

WEBSITE
APPLE PODCAST
SPOTIFY
AMAZON MUSIC
We are proud to announce the launch of our podcast, "Reckoning and Repair: The Art That's Touched Philadelphia". Each of the twelve 15-minute episodes features a richly experimental oral history with an artist, organizer, or curator who has worked in the city of Philadelphia, and whose practice reckons with exclusionary social histories and the (im?)possibilities of repair in art spaces and beyond. It was created by Penn students in conversation with artists and organizers in a course by Dr. Alissa Jordan,  “Reckoning and Repair: Conversations with Contemporary Artists,” at the Center for Experimental Ethnography. 

“Reckoning and Repair” will be released in three curated mini-series of four episodes released every two weeks starting on March 1 2023, and the podcast is in conversation with the March 2023 exhibit, “Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America,” organized by the African American Museum of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. With rich sonic interludes, micro-stories, and poetic prose, listeners will be brought into different moments and spaces intersecting in Philly’s transnational creative scene. It delves into the ways that artists and organizers confront the troubling histories of Empire in their midst, and the way that institutions can be made or remade to forge community and promote care. 

The professional-quality episodes are the outcome of background research conducted by students, oral history interviews designed by students, and group critique session. Through this project, students learned about oral history and podcasting as crucial tools through which scholars can explore and present the relationship between art, history, and power.

"Our students have done an incredible job of creatively engaging with a diverse set of artists  who work in Philadelphia and who are at the forefront of challenging  violent, extractive, and exclusionary processes that pervade society at large and can undermine art spaces” says Dr. Jordan. "Through these conversations, we hope to shed light on the artists, practices, and projects in Philadelphia that are reimagining what art is, who it's for, and towards what ends our institutions should be transformed.”

FORTHCOMING EPISODES


Telling Our Own Stories with Louis Massiah & Chrislyn Laurie Laurie
And I listen to the Robin Sing with Sheida Soleimani and Angel Gutierrez
The Urgency of Art and Life with Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi and Anya Miller
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The Question of Home is Complicated with Tausif Noor and Angel Gutierrez
Bodies in Flux with Saya Woolfalk and Wang Yao
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Crafting Black Survival and Joy through Time and Space with Emily Carris and Katleho Kano Shoro
Life Like Fragile Clay with Arlene Schechet & Rachael Borthwick
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We Are Here  with Dejay Duckett (AAMP) and Hakimah Abdul Fattah
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Some Histories Are Not Beautiful with Shwarga Bhattacharjee and Hakimah Abdul Fattah
To Call a City Home with Aisha Khan (12Gates Art) and Hakimah Abdul Fattah
Connection, Collaboration, Conflict with Christina Vassal (FWM) and Katie Parry (FWM) and Jeanne Lieberman
Behind the Scenes of Rising Sun with Juan Omar Rodriguez (Formerly of PAFA) Ellie Clark (PAFA) and Adrianna Brusie
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CAMRA Multi-Modal Workshop with Alissa Jordan

2/20/2023

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Heritage and Presence Humanities Symposium

2/6/2023

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Feb 24
9:30 - 6:30PM

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van pelt library
 
6th floor
 3420 Walnut Street

This Wolf Humanities Symposium is organized by Wolf Humanities Center's 2022-23 Graduate Research Assistant and CEE Graduate Student Jake Nussbaum; Graduate Fellow & CEE Graduate Student Larissa Johnson, and Graduate Fellows Max Johnson Dugan, and Anna Lehr Mueser; and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows Ioanida Costache, Richard Fadok, Margaret Geoga, Rebecca Haboucha, and Peter Sorensen. This Symposium is cosponsored by Penn's Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy; Annenberg School for Communication; Center for Africana Studies; Center for Experimental Ethnography; Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies; Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies; Cinema and Media Studies Program; Department of Anthropology; Department of History and Sociology of Science; and Department of Music. 

What is the relationship between heritage—a set of shared articulations and sensations of the past—and our lived realities? How do efforts to construct and erase these shared understandings impact the possibilities of a shared and shareable present? These questions have acquired new urgency over the past several years as historical formations of plantation slavery, settler-colonialism, and extractive capitalism become increasingly recognizable in the mundane operations of the university and the state; heritage claims fuel political violence and mass social movements; and supposedly unifying nationalisms deteriorate into entrenched positions around ownership of the past. Of course, for those most harmed by the projects of white supremacist heteropatriarchy these questions have always been urgent—matters of presence in the face of ongoing erasure—complicating easy distinctions between past, present, and future. In this multidisciplinary symposium, scholars, community organizers, and artists come together to unsettle the demarcations between heritage as an object of study and heritage as a site of ongoing practice and contestation.

9:30–10:00 am
Welcome Remarks
  • Jamal J. Elias, Director, Wolf Humanities Center; Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the Humanities; Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania
  • Emily Wilson, Topic Director, Wolf Humanities Center; College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities; Professor of Classical Studies

10:15 am–12:00 pm
Beyond the Institution: Perspectives from West Philadelphia and the Problems with Talking About Heritage at Penn
Recent activism at Penn has joined and amplified a long and expansive history of Black-led community organizing in West Philadelphia that has been critical of the university and its role in inflicting harm on their neighborhood, including the forced displacement of the Black Bottom, the gentrification of so-called “University City,” the possession of the remains of Black Philadelphians at the Penn Museum, and the abuse of Black prisoners for research by Penn scientists. In this roundtable, activists, organizers, scholars, and media-makers discuss these ongoing issues and elaborate on community-driven practices of heritage-making that are grounded in ethics of care, refusal, and self-determination.
  • Wanda Goss, University City Townhomes Resident
  • Maria Lyles, University City Townhomes Resident
  • NaOmi Richardson, Precious Places Community History Project
  • Christopher Rogers, Public Programs Director, The Paul Robeson House; Ph.D Candidate, Literacy, Culture, and International Education, University of Pennsylvania
  • Krystal Strong, Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Education, Rutgers University

1:30 pm–3:00 pm
Contesting Heritage: Counternarratives in the Material Record and the Built Environment

Moderator: Rebecca Haboucha, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center
Institutions, from the state to the university, often set the precedent for the management and preservation of historical knowledge, while academic disciplines such as archaeology, history, and anthropology have historically served to legitimize the erasure and removal of material histories of the marginalized. These authorized narratives of history have been challenged from both the grassroots and, to varying degrees of success, from the top down, suggesting the constructed and contested notion of the very term “heritage.” The speakers in this session explore how the material record and built environment can be a productive resource for contesting dominant understandings of the past and rethinking disciplinary and institutional trajectories.
  • Francesca Ammon, Associate Professor, City and Regional Planning and Historic Preservation, University of Pennsylvania
  • Richard Leventhal, Executive Director, Penn Cultural Heritage Center; Curator, Penn Museum; Professor, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
  • Felipe Rojas Silva, Associate Professor, Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology, Brown University

3:15–4:45 pm
Heritage Beyond the Record: Embodiment, Memory, Performance

Moderator: Ioanida Costache, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center
Heritage is something that we do. As Laurajane Smith posits it is “the multiple processes of meaning making” through acts of remembrance, communication, intergenerational transfer of knowledge, identity, and “social and cultural values and meanings” (2012). This panel interrogates multifarious ways of doing heritage. How can doing heritage articulate histories of colonial distortions and their patterns of continuity in the present? How are alternative epistemologies and ontologies embedded in the praxis of heritage? What tactics have been used historically and today to destroy, silence, ignore, disrupt, and distort heritage for the purpose of dehumanizing or delegitimizing marginalized communities' claims to selfhood, subjectivity, history, rights, and land? This panel critically examines how heritage is made in the body, in performance, and discursively and how these processes inform what each of us carries forward in the world.
  • Alex E. Chávez, Nancy O'Neill Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Notre Dame
  • Kim TallBear, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society; Professor, Native Studies, University of Alberta
  • Barbie Zelizer, Director, Center for Media at Risk; Raymond Williams Professor of Communication, University of Pennsylvania

4:50–5:00 pm
Closing Remarks
  • Jake Nussbaum, Research Associate, Wolf Humanities Center; Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

5:30–6:30 pm
Percussion Workshop
Master percussionist Hafez Kotain leads participants through a workshop in Arabic percussion.

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PARTAGE: AN EXHIBITION ON SCARS AND SUTURES OF THE COLONIAL MUSEUM

2/6/2023

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FEB 18th 6-9 PM

ATELIER ART GALLERY

The Critical Museum Study Group presents the exhibition, Partage, featuring the work of 13 artists.  Partage, comes from the 19th-to early 20th century archaeological practice of dividing collections and splitting objects in half between the host nation and the nation of the extractor, a premise that fractured histories and their representations. 
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MANGROVE SCHOOL SCREENING

2/6/2023

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FEB 13th-19th

WATCH FILM*
Note that link will take you to a password protected viewing site, which will only be opened on Feb 13th-19th, with the password "screenmangrove"

virtual screening

Don't miss a conversation with the filmmaker on Feb 16th at noon as part of CEE Third Thursday Series!
"We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body." - Sonia Borges
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THIRD THURSDAY WITH KEISHA-KHAN PERRY AND SONIA VAS BORGES

2/3/2023

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Feb 16th                                              12pm Virtual Event 

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Join us on February 16th at 12:00PM for an exciting conversation with Keisha-Khan Perry residential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Sónia Vaz Borges, an interdisciplinary militant historian and social-political. The two will discuss " Mangrove School" a film directed by ​Sónia Vaz Borges and Filipa César. A virtual screening of  "Mangrove School" will be available on Feb 13th with the conversation following on Feb 16th. 

"We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body." - Sonia Borges

Keisha-khan Perry

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Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Perry comes to Penn from Brown University, where she was Associate Professor of Africana Studies. Her research is focused on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is currently at work on her second book, which is focused on the ways in which state violence limits activist research and writing.

Sónia Vaz Borges

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Sónia Vaz Borges is an interdisciplinary militant historian and social-political organizer. Her book Militant  Education, Liberation Struggle, Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau 1963-1978 (Peter Lang, 2019) focuses on liberation schools and the concept and praxis developed by the PAIGC. She was also the editor of the booklets Cadernos Consciência e Resistência Negra(2007-2011) and author of the book Na Pó di Spéra. Percursos nos Bairros da Estrada Militar, Santa Filomena e Encosta Nascente (2014). Vaz Borges co-authored two short films Navigating the Pilot School (2016) and Mangrove School (2022). She is currently teaching at Drexel University in Philadelphia and developing a new project focused on her concept of the walking archive and the processes of memory and imagination.

Virtual screening of "MANGROVE SCHOOL"

Feb 13-19th 

watch here
A virtual screening of " Mangrove School" will take place between February 13-19th. The film will be made available only during the screening days. Enter the screening with the password:screenmangrove
(lowercase and one word)  on Feb 13th 2023.  Please note this password will be active during screening dates only. 
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FILMING THE FUTURE OF PHILADELPHIA

12/10/2022

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SCRIBE

DEc 10th

5PM

At Scribe on Saturday  Dec 10th, CEE gathered for a screening of films by the students of "Filming the Future of Philadelphia", a course led by our Fall fellow Damani Partridge. 
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"FIELD NOTES" WITH SAYA WOOLFALK

12/9/2022

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DEC 9 

4:30 PM

MORGAN GALLERY

Join us for a conversation and catalog release party for "Field Notes from the Empathic Universe" with artist and CEE Fellow Saya Woolfalk on December 9th, 2022, at 4:30 PM.  The event will take place in person at Morgan Gallery on the First Floor of Weitxman Hall 205 S. 34th Street.  This richly illustrated catalog includes full color prints of Saya's current exhibit at the Newark Museum of Art.  No registration is required!

SAYA WOOLFALK

CEE Fall Fellow
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Saya Woolfalk (Japan, 1979) is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions.  With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK,  Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. 

She has exhibited at museums, galleries, and alternative spaces throughout Asia, Europe and the United States including solo exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ (2012); the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2014); the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2014); SCAD Museum, Savannah, GA (2016); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY (2016); Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE (2016); the Mead Museum of Art, Amherst, MA (2017) and group shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA., the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others.
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Works by the artist are in the collections of major institutions including, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Mead Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum; the Newark Museum; the Chrysler Museum of Art; and the Seattle Art Museum where her major multi-media installation, commissioned and acquired by the Museum, is on extended view.   Solo exhibitions of works by Saya Woolfalk are also currently on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO (through September 1, 2019) and the Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI (through August 18, 2019).

Woolfalk is the recipient of numerous honors, awards, and commissions. She has delivered numerous public lectures at museums and universities throughout the United States including a recent TED X Talk. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York and teaches in MFA program at Yale School of Art as well as in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design

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"CLAIMING BLACKNESS" WITH DAMANI PARTRIDGE

12/1/2022

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DEC 1

5:00 PM

SLOUGHT 

Join us on December 1st at Slought Gallery for the "Claiming Blackness" event, to include film screening, conversation, and a book release with our Fall 2022 CEE Fellow Damani Partridge. At the event, Damani will discuss his Filming the Future of Cities project, as well as his new book "Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen, and Black Power in Berlin", released November 2022 with the University of California Press.

In this bold and provocative book, Damani J. Partridge examines the possibilities and limits of a universalized Black politics. Young people in Germany of Turkish, Arab, and African descent use claims of Blackness to hold states and other institutions accountable for their everyday struggle. Partridge tracks how these youth invoke the expressions of Black Power, acting out the medal-podium salute from the 1968 Olympics, proclaiming "I am Malcolm X," expressing mutual struggle with Muhammad Ali and Spike Lee, and standing with raised and clenched fists next to Angela Davis. Partridge also documents the demands by public-school teachers, federal-program leaders, and politicians that young immigrants account for the global persistence of anti-Semitism as part of the German state's commitment to antigenocidal education. He uses these stories to interrogate the relationships among European Enlightenment, Holocaust memory, and Black futures, showing how noncitizens work to reshape their everyday lives. In doing so, he demonstrates how the concept of Blackness energizes, inspires, and makes possible participation beyond national belonging for immigrants, refugees, Black people, and other People of Color.

DAMANI PARTRIDGE

CEE Faculty Fellow
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Damani J. Partridge is the Fall 2022 Fellow at the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He is also an affiliate with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and has published broadly on questions of citizenship, affect, urban space, sexuality, decolonization, post-Cold War “freedom,” Holocaust memorialization, African-American military occupation, Blackness and embodiment, the production of noncitizens, the culture and politics of “fair trade,” and the Obama moment in Berlin. He has also made and worked on documentaries for private and public broadcasters in the United States and Canada, and currently directs the Filming Future Cities Project in Detroit and Berlin (see filmingfuturecities.org). His first book, Hypersexuality and headscarves: Race, sex, and citizenship in the new Germany, was published in the New Anthropologies of Europe series with Indiana University Press in 2012. His forthcoming book, Blackness as a universal claim: Holocaust heritage, noncitizen politics, and Black power in Berlin will be published with the University of California Press in 2022.

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Third Thursday with Krzysztof Wodiczko

11/1/2022

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NOV 17th

REGISTER HERE

1:30 PM

VIRTUAL EVENT

Join us on November 17th at 1:30 PM for an exciting conversation with Krzystof Wodiczko, an artist whose avant-garde projections and slides have graced architectural facades around the world, engaging publics in the challenging social topics of war and its aftermath, and the effect of gendered violence and gendered silence in public life. He will join in conversation about two of these projects, "The Tijuana Projection" and "Loro" with Ken Lum, The Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and Chair of Fine Arts at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Speaker
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Krzysztof Wodiczko is born 1943 in Warsaw, Poland, lives and works in New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Warsaw. His projections on architectural facades, and monuments as well as especially designed performative instruments give a public voice to the marginalized city residents. Krzysztof Wodiczko has held retrospective exhibitions at numerous museums and his work has been presented at Documenta, Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and many other art festivals.He received the 4th Hiroshima Art Price "for his contribution as an international artist to the world peace". He is a former director of the MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Professor of Art, Design and the Public Domain, Emeritus, at G.S.D, Harvard. His is presently teaching as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Weitzman School of Design, UPenn .

​The film documenting his artistic work.The Art of Un-War directed by Maria Niro and released in 2022, is distributed by New Day Films.Krzysztof Wodiczko’s books include Critical Vehicles, MIT Press, Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Abolition of War, and The Transformative Avant-Garde, published by Black Dog Press. ​

KEN LUM

Discussant
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Ken Lum was born in Vancouver, Canada but presently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he is the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

From 2000 to 2006 Ken Lum was head of the graduate program in studio art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he taught from 1990 until 2006. Lum joined the faculty of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, in 2005 and worked there until 2007. He has been an invited professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and the China Art Academy, Hangzhou.

Lum is co-founder and founding editor of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He has published extensively; and recently completed an artists’ book project with philosopher Hubert Damisch that was launched with Three Star Press, Paris.

Lum was Project Manager for Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 – 1994 (2001). He was also co-curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial (2005), and Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945 (2005).

Lum has exhibited widely, including São Paulo Biennial (1998), Shanghai Biennale (2000), Documenta 11 (2002), the Istanbul Biennial (2007), and the Gwangju Biennale (2008), Moscow Biennial 2011 and the Whitney Biennial 2014.  He has published many essays on art.

He has also realized permanent public art commissions for the cities of Vienna, Vancouver, Utrecht, Leiden, St. Moritz, Toronto and St Louis.
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DEATH/FAST SCREENING

10/4/2022

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RAINEY AUDITORIUM
​PENN MUSEUM

OCT 17 3:30 PM

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Death/Fast is a 52-minute experimental video documentary about the 2,286-day mass hunger strike (2000-2007) undertaken by political prisoners contesting the regime of isolation in Turkey's newly instituted F-type, high-security prisons. Anchored in in-person interviews with survivors, the documentary recovers the experience of hunger strikers which serves as the disavowed condition of possibility for the retroactive self-authorization on the part of political organizations. Juxtaposing rehearsed narratives about their transformations in relation to time, to others, to truth—and to death—with imagery taken from everyday life in public locations across contemporary Istanbul, the documentary probes the (non)relation between the distinct temporality of the hunger strike and the heterogeneous temporalities of urban life immersed in daily activity/inactivity, between the violence of the prison and the violence hidden in everyday life.
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Produced by Brian Karl and Özge Serin and first screened in 2017, Death/Fast uses ensembles of visual and audio techniques, including image flashes of extremely short duration, emulating the scar effects of long-term starvation on memory; extreme cropping within the larger frames of moving images, representing isolation outside prison; and the use of faint image-traces of speaking subjects, creating ghostly figures to suggest the ephemerality and tentativeness of any single subject position. Together, the combined effect of excerpts from interviews and formal choices in representation within the audio and video of the documentary challenge and loosen the conventional links between the experience of dying and those grammars that purport to represent and politicize it.
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​Özge Serin
WHITMAN COLLEGE

Özge Serin received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics and Anthropology at Whitman College. Her research and writing are principally concerned with formations of violence, carceral regimes, and corporeal forms of resistance with a particular focus on the practice of hunger striking, its temporal structure, modes of strategic functioning, communicative force, and ethical vicissitudes. She has published articles and chapters in boundary 2, Kampfplatz, and Re-enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory. Her book manuscript, Writing of Death: Ethics and Politics of the Death Fast in Turkey, explores the divide between the incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked space-times of death and politics, and poses the question of the mediality of the hunger strike
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BRIAN KARL
UC Berkeley 


Brian Karl has worked as a curator, producer and director at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Harvestworks Media Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art­in­General, Creative Time, and the Kitchen, along with serving as editor for Tellus, the Audio Art Magazine. His art criticism has been published in Artforum, Art Practical, Daily Serving, Hyperallergic and Yishu, among others. He has also produced multiple experimental documentaries screened at the Jewish Museum, the Whitney Biennial, and the New York and San Francisco Film Festivals, among other venues. He has taught courses widely in art, music, and cultural anthropology, including at the New School, Fordham University, Colby College, the University of Michigan, the California College of the Arts and San Francisco Art Institute.
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OCTOBER THIRD THURSDAY: BILLY DUFALA

10/3/2022

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OCT 20 

REGISTER HERE

12PM

VIRTUAL CONVERSATION

Join in virtual conversation with CEE for October's Third Thursday event, where Ken Lum is in conversation with Billy Dufala of RAIR (Recycled Artist In Residency). Billy is the Director of Residencies and Co-Founder of RAIR, a non-profit arts organization situated inside a construction and demolition waste recycling company called Revolution Recovery in northeast Philadelphia. RAIR's mission is to challenge the perception of waste culture by providing a unique platform for artists at the intersection of art and industry. 
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Billy Dufala is a Philadelphia-based artist engaged in a variety of creative disciplines, including sculpture, performance, digital media, and drawing. He is co-¬founder of the artist collective Traction Company, and of RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residence), an arts organization operating onsite at Revolution Recovery, a recycling company in Northeast Philadelphia.

Dufala is best known for his ongoing collaborative work with his brother Steven; together they are known as the Dufala Brothers. The duo's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the West Collection; Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts; Space 1026; Fleisher/Ollman, and Fleisher Art Memorial; as well as in group exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, and others.

​In 2009, the Dufala Brothers were awarded the West Grand Prize, an international juried prize in its inaugural year. In 2015, RAIR received Center support to present Live at the Dump, an interactive, site-specific program that utilized a series of films, performances, and discussions to increase public awareness of the waste stream and the role of art in shaping social and environmental consciousness.
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Ken Lum was born in Vancouver, Canada but presently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he is the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

From 2000 to 2006 Ken Lum was head of the graduate program in studio art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he taught from 1990 until 2006. Lum joined the faculty of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, in 2005 and worked there until 2007. He has been an invited professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Munich, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and the China Art Academy, Hangzhou.

Lum is co-founder and founding editor of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He has published extensively; and recently completed an artists’ book project with philosopher Hubert Damisch that was launched with Three Star Press, Paris.

Lum was Project Manager for Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 – 1994 (2001). He was also co-curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial (2005), and Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945 (2005).
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EXPERIMENTAL WRITING WEDNESDAYS

10/1/2022

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Join CEE for Experimental Writing Wednesday's in the CEE Lounge in Room 438 of the Penn Museum. Find space and collective energy for your individual writing projects! Pop in and out at any point, or stay for a marathon day of writing.

We welcome transient visitors as well as regular writers who want to meet weekly. Right now, our cohort includes a mix of proposal writers, manuscript writers, and some multimedia editors. All kinds and levels of writing are welcome, including those experimenting with photography, film, and art in their writing.
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Our meetings are largely devoted to individual writing time, but follow the general schedule. 
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WRITING SESSION SCHEDULE

​10:00 AM: Check in with a brief discussion of your project and writing goal for the session [This is also when we sometimes have visitors to our group!]

10:20: Individual writing/editing time

12:00: Check in with a brief note (or progress report or lamentation) on our progress. 

12:30-1:00 Break for individual lunch (or keep writing if you choose!)

1:00 PM: Check in about big-picture structural plans (or other writing goals)

1:15-??: Individual writing/editing time.
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CAMRA'S MULTIMODAL WORKSHOPS

10/1/2022

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SECOND THURSDAYS

3-6PM
​CEE LOUNGE (438)

Join CAMRA at the CEE Lounge every second Thursday from 3:30PM to 6:00 PM to workshop your multimodal projects, ideas, or concepts!

Starting October 2022, 
CAMRA will be hosting a monthly workshop space for people to bring in, share, and work through their multimodal projects with a community of people interested in and/ or are engaged in multimodal work.

Expect visits from 
CAMRA mentors, faculty, members and alumni through the semester. We will be at the Center for Experimental Ethnography and will have access to video and audio technology for those who might need it. Some of us will also be using this space to work on on Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) submissions
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  • Dates for Fall Semester: 13th October / 10th November / 8th December ( (second Thursdays)
  • Time: 3 - 6pm
  • Place: Center for Experimental Ethnography, Fourth Floor, Room #438, Academic Wing of the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphi
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PENN MUSEUM 336
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
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