THE CENTER  FOR  EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY

medium/archive | 2019-2020 Theme

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. 

SPRING 2020 COURSES 

Museums, Colonialism, and the Question of Property | It Was the Law At The Time
Prof. Dr. Wayne Modest | CEE Spring Fellow 2020

Current discussions about who owns cultural property, especially in relation to objects acquired under and during Europe's colonial project, form their arguments, limits and possibilities around international legal instruments. Like broader claims for reparations by formally colonized peoples, legal demands for reparations or restitution with regard to cases of colonial injustice often run up against responses such as 'it was the law at the time' ... Proposed solutions for these conflicts almost always circumvent questions of ownership (at the time) or other legal possibilities. They are sought in extra-legal ways. Keep Reading...
Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape | Ships
Emily Carris (CEE Spring Fellow 2020) & Dr. Grace Sanders Johnson  & Joanne Douglass

The artistic and community practice of boating/shipping is the touch point for this course. The course revolves around three major projects. First, the seminar readings and discussion will prime students with ethnographic, historical, theoretical, and technical understandings of boats and shipping. Second, students will share-collect oral histories with members of the black West and North Philadelphia boating communities. With these narratives, course participants will craft a sail that responds to the immediate concerns and aspirations regarding black escape and freedom. Keep Reading...

MONTH IN REVIEW

MEDIUM/ARCHIVE

Ernst Karel + Veronika Kusumaryati
CEE Visiting Fellow Ernst Karel and collaborator Veronika Kusumaryati presented a provocative preview of an augmented sound work composed from the resulting 37 hours of tape in the audio archives resulting from the ‘Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea’ organized by filmmaker Robert Gardner 1961. The piece deeply engages with questions about the colonial presents (and histories) of ethnography using largely unedited sound from the HPENNG archives pieced together into a masterful crescendo. Michael Rockefellers boyish voice---sometimes muffled, sometimes clear, and always tense with excitement---indexes narrow slices of Hubula landscapes and lifeworld that are both strikingly intimate (such as a woman washing clothing while laughing at him) and immersive on a grand scale (a suspended moment where the sounds of a swarm of bees overwhelm the ears). 

IMPLOSION

Multimodal Exhibition
Implosion is a Multimodal Exhibition put on by graduate students in the ANTH 541 Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s) course. These amazing, interdisciplinary, and collaborative projects were the products of semester-long work. Students took inspiration from the conceptual work of Donna Haraway and Joe Dumit to implode on combat medic trenches, an ebola epidemic, a data center, Monsanto´s glyphosate, and Mirena IUD technology, and then built multimodal installations out of the exercise. 

EXPERIMENTS

In Audio Ethnography
Students from CEE Fellow Ernst Karel's course, ANTH 559/MUS 559, ‘Audio Ethnography’, presented a tremendously immersive set of final sound works in the Rainey Auditorium of the Penn Museum. 

Winnie W.C. Lai presented "Stand with Hong Kong: Sounding Pain and Roar Through the Lennon Walls"; Chase Castle presented "Breaking Boundaries"; Florence Madenga presented "Night and Day"
Juliet Glazer presented "Power Tools / Tones"; Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo presented "Rivered Landscapes and Hidden Rivers" ; Nightplant Radio presented; "Home Depeauxwave: Exposure Vigils"; Jacob Nussbaum presented "What the Garden Belongs To"; Austin Fisher presented "250kVA"; Armaghan Fakhraeirad presented "Building Morality"

STAY TUNED FOR SSMF 2020!

 The 8th Annual SSMF will be held on March 27th-28th, 2020 at the University of Pennsylvania and is a hybrid of a film/media festival and an academic conference.  This year, we received submissions from scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers, and educators that creatively explore the theme of “Rupture and Repair.” T ....read more

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