THE CENTER  FOR  EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY

medium/archive | 2019-2020 Theme

The Torture Letters

"When I think about the circumstances of your death, I can't help but remember the first man to expose police torture in Chicago: Andrew Wilson. His life and your death lead us to question: what kinds of police violence are we willing to accept?"

- "The Torture Letters" op-doc by Laurence Ralph, filmmaker & anthropologist

RESEARCHING STATE VIOLENCE THROUGH IMAGE & ANIMATION

DR. lAURENCE RALPH

This month we are excited to share Ralph's work as an anthropologist, animator, and filmmaker in "The Torture Lettters", which has been selected as a New York Times Op-Doc. A Professor of Anthropolo​gy at Princeton, Laurence Ralph is also the Director of the Center on Transnational Policing, along with Aisha

WATCH NOW: "THE TORTURE LETTERS"

Now premiering in The New York Times’ Opinion Documentary Series!  Based on more than a decade of research, this Op-Doc serves as an instant primer on the roots of police violence. Right now, somewhere in the United States, similar episodes of police violence are still playing out...Read NYT Piece

RECKONING WITH POLICE VIOLENCE

“Infuriating, compassionate, and accessible, this book is a meditation on torture told through a series of letters. In The Torture Letters, Ralph searingly explores the costs of police violence to individuals and society while making sure to also center community resistance....” ----Mariame Kaba, founder & director of Project NIA
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now screening 

SAYRE HIGH SCHOOL (10:34)

By Jean Chapiro & Maryann Dreas &
Alejandra Villalobos

PHILADELPHIA HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIRLS (08:18)

By Dominique “Nikki” Thomas & Armaghan Fakhraeirad & Fax Amilliion Victor 

capa (08:21)

By Candace Eaton & Dallas Taylor & Nithya Adusumilli

PROF. GUTHRIE RAMSEY ELECTED
TO ​AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES​

We are excited to announce that Prof. Guthrie Ramsey has been elected to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Ramsey is an accomplished composer, pianist, and musicologist, and is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Dr. Ramsey's latest music project is "A Spiritual Vibe, Vol. 1,"  (watch a video on the project here), and he is the author of  Race Music:  Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop, The Amazing Bud Powell:  Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop and African American Music:  Grove Music Essentials (Kindle Edition), as well as the filmmaker of Amazing:  The Tests and Triumph of Bud Powell , and the founder of the popular blog Musiqology.com.   Ramsey composed and performed the music for the film Making Sweet Tea, by Nora Gross and John L. Jackson, Jr. which has been winning awards at film festivals across the country (watch trailer). 

​As an educator, Dr. Ramsey was awarded the 2019 CEE Course Development Grant to launch his innovative course: “The Music Industry Meets Activism.” In the course, Penn students learned about community activism and the music industry through up-close experiences with community organizations and  artists, culminating in their work co-producing (with Green District Media and a graduate student in the Annenberg School of Communication) a professional music video for the song "Hurricane" by Philadelphia artist Vince Anthony. Our most heartfelt congratulations, Dr. Ramsey!

PRESIDENT'S ENGAGEMENT PRIZE

Congratulations to Marcia Ferguson (Senior Lecturer in Theatre Arts & CEE Affiliated Faculty) who mentored Meera Menon and Philip Chen, winners of the President's Engagement & Innovation Prize for "The Unscripted Project". ​
Watch our Zoom conversation with Marcia Ferguson about the project​ here & read the prize announcement.
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Photo courtesy Emily Carris & Wayne Modest

Just cut us some slack

Watch an online conversation with our CEE 2020 Fellows Wayne Modest and Emily Carris who discuss love, joy, laughter, being black today, materiality, and the urgencies of our contemporary condition. Watch Now...
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Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, proposal work 2020. Photograph by Rå Vitche-Boul.

PERFORMANCE INTENSIVE

Catch up on the eight-day Performance Intensive, which was held in Philadelphia between January 5th and January 12, 2020. ​Read More. 

RESOURCES FOR UNCERTAINTY

FEBRUARY EVENTS

ZAMA ZAMA PROJECT

Slought

Join Slought on February 20th 6:30 to 8:30 PM for Documentary for Critical Times, a conversation about the possibilities and limits of the moving image in times of crisis. Organized in conjunction with the installation The Zama Zama Project, this event will feature a conversation with artists Susan Meiselas and Rosalind Morris about what it means to produce documents and documentaries of crisis...Keep Reading

DIALOGUE

Patricia Roberts-Miller & Seth Kreimer

On February 20th, join Professor Patricia Roberts-Miller (University of Texas at Austin) and Professor Seth Kreimer (University of Pennsylvania Law School) in a dialogue about Demagoguery and Free Speech. Demagoguery has a been a frequent topic of American documentary films. Demagoguery is also seen as posing a threat to news media around the world today. But what precisely is "demagoguery"?   Read More...

THE MOVEMENT REVISITED

Christian McBride & Sonia Sanchez
Please join us for this very special discussion, moderated by Dyana Williams, and duo performance in celebration of Christian McBride’s The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait of Four Icons (Mack Avenue Records) at Penn Museum’s Widener Lecture Hall. The Movement Revisited grew into a sweeping four-part suite for big jazz band, small jazz group...Read More & RSVP Here...

CURRENT FELLOWS

WAYNE MODEST

Wayne Modest is the head of the Research Center of Material Culture. He is also professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies (by special appointment) in the faculty of humanities at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (VU). Modest’s work is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to material culture/museum collections.

EMILY CARRIS

Emily Carris is an artist and founding member of The Art Dept. Collective, a collaborative vintage store and workshop space dedicated to sharing stories and uplifting underserved artists.
Her work exploring the personal and cultural legacy of slavery and the Black female body has been exhibited nationally and internationally. 

RECENT EVENTS

SPRING FELLOW MEETUP

Emily Carris + Wayne Modest
For the first Third Thursday of 2020, students, faculty, and community friends gathered together to meet up with incoming CEE Faculty Fellows Emily Carris and Wayne Modest. Emily began her presentation  posing a question that first occurred to her in England, while contemplating an image of a slave ship in a tumultuous ocean.... "what does salt know?" Seven years after her work in England, Emily returned to Philadelphia to work on developing institutional space for art as scholarship, which culminated in her founding the Art Dept. Collective. 
Read More...

ZAMA ZAMA PROJECT

Multimodal Exhibition at Slought
The Zama Zama Project" is a multi-format installation by Rosalind Morris about the world of informal mining in the abandoned gold mines of South Africa, on display January 24 - March 20, 2020. The opening event, titled "The Cost of Gold," took place on Wednesday, January 29th from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought featured a conversation about informal mining and its representation with artist Rosalind Morris and Radhika Subramaniam, moderated by Eduardo Cadava. The exhibit and opening are both free and open to the public. 

SONIC WORLDS

Juan Castrillon (CEE Student) 
Between January 21st and the 24th, Juan Castrillon (PhD Candidate in Music and CEE Graduate Certificate Student) delivered three guest lectures at the University of Helsinki: Amazonian Indigenous Music and Communication with Non-Humans: The Sonic Worlds of the Hehenewa People, multimodal methods in ethnomusicology, and Sonic Worlds of Dervishes. In addition, the University will be hosting film screenings of Rehavi (Timekeepers) and ~Kiraiñia (Long Flutes) followed by Q&As with Juan. Check out the trailer to ~Kiraiñia here:

GET INVOLVED

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​You are also invited to contact us directly at experimental-ethno@upenn.edu.