HEARING HEAT

STEVEN FELD

DEC 8 at 5PM

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Join us for the Fall 2020 Fellows Event by Steven Feld (CEE Fellow, Fall 2020). Hearing Heat listens to histories of listening to cicadas in Papua New Guinea, Japan, and Greece. Through a swelling intensification of intermedial recontextualizations, cicadas are amplified as a companion species thermosonic technology that bears ongoing witness to “the climate of history” in anthropocene atrocities ranging from rainforest destruction to nuclear escalation to precarious heat waves.  

This intermedial performance piece is designed for installation of 6-8 rooms with variously positioned speakers and screens presenting an experimental interplay of voice(s), acoustic biospheres, poesis, musical composition, film and television soundtracks, graphic design and notation, sonographic spectra, sculpture and physical objects. The physical installation version of the piece will be recrafted for CEE online experience as a fifty-minute film in the form of an “exhibit walk-through tour,” with discussion to follow.

STEVEN FELD IN CONVERSATION WITH 

KRISTINA LYONS

Kristina Lyons’ current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, transitional justice, community-based forms of reconciliation, science studies, and legal anthropology in Colombia.  Her manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke 2020), moves across laboratories, greenhouses, forests, and farms in the capital city of Bogotá and the Andean-Amazonian department of Putumayo. It weaves together an intimate ethnography of two kinds of practitioners – state soil scientists and peasant farmers – who attempt to cultivate alternatives to commercial coca crops and the military-led, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to substitute them. In 2015, Dr. Lyons directed a popular education documentary film project based on farmer-to-farmer alternative agricultural practices called Cultivating a Bien Vivir (Living Well) in the Amazon. She was recently awarded a Fulbright Award (2021) to support the work of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) in a case with local communities in southern Colombia that renders visible the territory as a victim of the country’s social armed conflict by reconstructing the socio-environmental memory of the war.

JAIRO MORENO

Jairo Moreno's work in music theory addresses the production of knowledge of music and the sonic in modernity from a historic-speculative perspective. He has written a major study of the history of listening in early modern and modern music theory and analysis, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Indiana University Press, 2004). Syncopated Modernities: Musical Latin Americanisms in the U.S., 1978-2008 (forthcoming, U. of Chicago Press) presents an archival, critical, and ethnographic study of music’s precarious share in political practices during late capitalism, with a focus on the intersections of aurality, the politics of aesthetics, and Latin-American popular music in the U.S during the long 20th century. He is co-editor of the Oxford University Press series Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound, and co-editor of Econophonia: Music, Value, and Forms of Life (Boundary 2, 2016). Most recently, he is conducting research and fieldwork with the Pankararu community of Brejo dos Padres (Brazil), part of work on aural practices and “empirical metaphysics” among midwives there and in the Colombian Pacific region. Awards include the Society for American Music 2005 Irving Lowens Article Award for Best Article (“Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin Jazz”), ACLS Fellowship (2009-2010), and National Humanities Center Fellowship (2012-2013). A former professional bassist, he appeared in five Grammy Award nominated recordings with the late Latin and Jazz percussionist Ray Barretto (Blue Note, EMI-France, Concord, Fania labels—1989-1997), played in numerous other recordings, and performed chamber music with guitarist David Starobin and the Ciompi String Quartet, among others.

GREG URBAN

Greg Urban has taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 1994. He specializes in cultural and linguistic anthropology, laws of cultural motion, and ethnography of corporations, among other areas. The author, co-author, or editor of seven books, including How Culture Moves through the World, Dr. Urban’s work has also appeared in American Anthropologist  and other journals. He also teaches in the Executive Development Program at the Wharton School's Aresty Institute of Executive Education, a program designed for professionals transitioning to a new level of leadership. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.