THE CENTER  FOR  EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY

medium/archive | 2019-2020 Theme

EVENTS

MASS SHOOTINGS AND THE QUEST FOR FAME
​A conversation about the representation of mass violence from David Bowie to Parkland, with survivor and activist Samantha Fuentes. Slought and the SP2 Social Justice and Arts Integration Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce "Mass Shootings and the Quest for Fame," a public conversation on FRIDAY, Dec 13, 2019 from 6:30-8:30pm. The event will explore how the quest for fame motivates mass shooters, and will feature survivor and activist Samantha Fuentes and cultural anthropologist Eric Montgomery in conversation, and will be moderated by artist Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri.
MEDIUM/ARCHIVE 
​(Earlier this month)
On MONDAY DEC 2 at 5:30 PM in the Rainey Auditorium at the Penn Museum, CEE Visiting Fellow Ernst Karel and collaborator Veronika Kusumaryati presented a preview of an augmented sound work composed from the 37 hours of tape in the audio archives resulting from the ‘Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea’ organized by filmmaker Robert Gardner in 1961. The piece reflected on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to anthropology, the lives of the Hubula and of Michael Rockefeller, and the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua.
 VA BENE ELIKEM FIATSI
(Earlier this month)
Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi (preferred pronoun "sHe/it"), who performs under the name crazinisT artisT,  gave  a lunch presentation on THURSDAY DEC 5th at 1 PM in the CEE offices. Vab's multimedia and installation/performance work uses the body as a thought provoking tool to explore the constructedness of identity, themes of bodily entrapment, scapegoating, and extreme marginality. During the lunch, Va Bene discussed sHe/it's most recent work in decolonizing arts organizing as the creator and director of an Ghana-based artists residency that, for its second year in 2020, will bring 58 international artists from dozens of nations for a 2 month collaborative residency in public contemporary art in Kumasi, Ghana.

MONTH IN REVIEW

THIRD THURSDAY 

CEE IN CONVERSATION WITH ANTHROPOLOGIST & FILMMAKER ALEX FATTAL
On Oct 18th we joined Alex Fattal at Slought in Philadelphia to look at a work in progress and discuss methods in experimental filmmaking and the open-ended and unfinished limbo of demobilization in Colombia. 

#FROMNO2LOVE

A BLACK FEMINIST CENTERED FORUM ON DISRUPTING SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Aishah Shahidah Simmons, the award-winning director of the film No! The Rape Documentary, and the editor of the anthology Love With Accountability
partnered with the University of Pennsylvania, the Just Beginnings Collaborative, Feminist and Gender Studies Program at Colorado College, Scribe Video Center, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Leeway Foundation, and other sponsors/ partners in a gathering to lift up the long-term and new survivor-led work that addresses, disrupts, and works to humanely end child sexual abuse and adult rape in Black and marginalized communities.
MOON VIEWING PLATFORM
 The Moon Viewing Platform, designed by Philadelphia artists Nadia Hironaka & Matthew Suib and Eugene Lew (UPenn Dept of Music, CEE Faculty Affiliate) is an interdisciplinary public installation that transformed an inhospitable and disused stretch of open-air land into a large-scale performance/gathering space featuring regular acts of caring, a stage, and building-sized nighttime video projections featuring an episodic series of short films. The garden/installation references the karesansui (Japanese dry landscape garden), as it becomes a set for a series of short videos and musical performances, inviting audiences to enter another world through the senses and the imagination.

CURRENT FELLOW

ERNST KAREL 
Photo by Domenico Singha Pedroli
Ernst Karel works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, and postproduction sound for nonfiction vilm [film/video], with an emphasis on observational cinema. His work focuses on the practice of location recording and composing with unprocessed location recordings. From 2006 through 2017, Ernst managed the Sensory Ethnography Lab and the Film Study Center at Harvard University, where he collaborated with filmmakers and taught courses in reality-based audio.  
Photo (background) by Ernst Karel

SUBMIT YOUR MEDIA WORK

 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. We invite submissions from scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers, and educators of all backgrounds that creatively explore the theme of “Rupture and Repair.” The submission system will be open until November 27, 2019. ....read more

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