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JANUARY THIRD THURSDAY

1/19/2021

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EVENTBRITE LINK

January 21, 2021
noon


For our first Third Thursday of Spring Semester 2021, CEE opened with Deborah Thomas offering comments on Jenny Chio's work  as a filmmaker, a writer, and also as a fieldworker, followed by an introduction to the work and background of Reggie Wilson, who is a choreographer, researcher, and artist

Jenny offered preliminary comments on her experience of returning to teaching and the change in priorities since COVID-19 and quarantine, as well has how impressed she has been with the resilience she has seen in LA and around the world.

Reggie spoke about identifying as a "lay anthropologist" in his artistic practice, drawing from his experiences reading Zora Neale Hurston. While reading Hurston as a student, Reggie began asking questions about what it means for him to examine cultures and communities that he is a part of. He reflected on his virtual travel back and forth between home sites, like Milwaukee, and the place of his work in New York, given the exigencies of COVID, and how the places you are, and who you are and what you are shape what your questions are and what your questions have been

Deb, asking after the way Jenny works, followed with a provocation about the relationship between people and place and what holds that relationship together. Jenny responded with the obligation to locality, and not the same as the obligation to countries. As well as the different ways she herself is coming to terms with both critique of nation and the support experienced within nations, contributing to who she is as ascholar. She spoke of the need for space to define such relationships ina way that is both critical and empathetic, critical and supportive.

Reggie spoke both of people and place as concepts that are both "infinite," the difference groups we expand into. It plays out in who you are and what you are trained to do, that influence of locality, of place, is not small in who we are. If people is the body, or the bodies, then place, or choreographic space, is the "where the body does its things". Also, Reggie offered reflections on place not just as a physical site outside the body, but place as site---place can be within one's head, or a specific spot on a wrist.

Jenny continued with reflections on portraiture and people and place, specifically, in portraiture asking what is the place that gets created in the contact between person and place. Furthermore, how people and objects come to make a place within the realm of portraiture.

In the question and answer session, Ore asked after process and positionality starting with Reggie who spoke of going first to begin research, the ways it moves between non-linear explorations and the pressure to make it linear for the sake of grant writing. But once established, there is a a research period, followed by being in the space, feeling it out, then sometimes the need to bring the company in, or part of the company, so that several people can begin moving in a space, then external forces and pressures to define it, to find definitions for the sake of presenting and funding.

Jenny Chio reflected on being introduced to a particular site for her PhD, and how things have unraveled between one village she worked in, the loss of touch with the field, and the way that a difference developed in relationship between towns and between times. She is thinking critically about preserving and nurturing relationships, and the work that it takes. And the difference in time in the research relationship, both over time, and in the way the length of time spent in research changes so dramatically.

Jenny also went on to speak of portraiture as context, the roll of setting, the relationship between the sitter and the photographer, and also the sitter and all the objects, the sites involved.

Jasmine Blanks-Jones posed a question about personhood to the speakers, asking for comments about how and where personhood is located. doesn't just reside in a body but between bodies, between individual bodies.

Reggie than offered reflections on site and place---the example of dance exploring site, diving into it. The need to understand different definitions of site.

Va Bene Elikem Fiatsi, posed a question about place in the context of the term "Africans in the Americas", and the mutations and relationships that the term implies. Reggie responded by turning attention tot the importance of local specifities and places in the lives of artists and people, and the critical process of "local" sites in shaping who people are.


reggie wilson

Reggie Wilson is Executive and Artistic Director, Choreographer and Performer of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group. His work draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and is combined with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he sometimes refers to as "post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances." He has lectured, taught and conducted workshops and community projects, and had his work presented nationally and internationally. Wilson is a recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance's McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001), is a 2002 BESSIE recipient, and is a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson has been an artist advisor for the National Dance Project, a Board Member of Dance Theater Workshop, and in recognition of his creative contributions to the field, was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow, as well as being a recipient of the 2009 Herb Alpert Award in Dance. In 2012 he was named a Wesleyan University’s Creative Campus Fellow, received an inaugural Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; And received the 2012 Joyce Foundation Award for his successful work Moses(es) that premiered in 2013. His critically acclaimed work CITIZEN premiered 2016 (FringeArts – World; BAM NextWave 2016 - NYC) and is currently touring. Wilson was curator of Danspace Project’s Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance (Platform 2018) and created the commissioned work “…they stood shaking while others began to shout” specifically for the space at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. Most recently, he curated Grounds That Shout! (and others merely shaking), a series of performances in Philadelphia’s historic sacred spaces. His newest work is titled POWER.



JENNY CHIO

Jenny Chio is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London. As a cultural anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, her writing and filmmaking explore the shifting intersections of subjectivity, collective memory, and modernity, with an emphasis on race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage as powerful categories in the contemporary world. She investigates these issues through long-term ethnographic fieldwork and documentary filmmaking on independent and vernacular media practices, urbanization and the transformation of rural landscapes and livelihoods, and cultural tourism in the People's Republic of China. Her 2014 book, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, and 2013 film, 农家乐Peasant Family Happiness, examine how the expediencies of tourism, from landscapes and architecture to “learning to be ethnic” for tourists, have shaped the lives and livelihoods of rural, ethnic minority village residents in Southwest China. Her current projects include an ethnography of vernacular media practices in rural China and an ethnographic portrait film of two Miao women in Guizhou province. Most recently, she has written about tourism and race, theorizing ethnographic film, festival crowds and ethnic body politics, and the vernacular videography of bullfights. She served as Co-Editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review from 2016-2018 and as Co-Curator of the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival in 2013 and 2014. Her website is www.jennychio.com.
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DOOMSDAY: FIELD NOTES

12/3/2020

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“It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?”
– Sun Ra
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with knightworks dance theater

dec 3 at 5PM

REGISTER HERE

 
How do you archive something that hasn’t happened yet? What would an archive of the end of the world look like?

On December 3rd at 5 PM EST, Center for Experimental Ethnography fellow Christina Knight and choreographer Jessi Knight of knightworks dance theater will discuss their forthcoming short film, “doomsday: field notes,” a fictional work documenting a mysterious set of ritual practices discovered by an anthropologist from the future. In the film, fragments of dance, glimpses of community building, and invocations of black feminist writing reveal a “doomsday church” invested in charting a black future. For this conversation, knightworks will share their creative and collaborative process, screen clips of the work-in-progress, and discuss their investments in the black speculative.  
 
Christina Knight is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Haverford College. Knight's work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently completing a book manuscript that focuses on represents of the Middle Passage in contemporary American visual art and performance. Knight is also at work on a new project that examines the influences of drag culture on contemporary black art. Jessi Knight is a dancer, teacher, and choreographer from Pittsboro, N.C. After graduating from Duke University with a self-designed dance degree with an emphasis in music and education, Jessi embarked on a teaching and choreographing career that has afforded her the opportunity to teach, choreograph and perform both locally and nationally.  She spent four years in Denver, Colorado as a member of the internationally acclaimed Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and currently resides in North Carolina where she continues to choreograph and perform on a project by project basis for her company knightworks dance theater.
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HEARING HEAT

12/1/2020

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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.
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memorializing otherwise

11/12/2020

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GABRIELLE GOLIATH +
KEN LUM +
​DEBORAH ANZINGER

NOV 19 AT NOON

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For our November Third Thursday event, "Memorializing Otherwise" on November 19th at Noon, we joined Ken Lum, Deborah Anzinger, and Gabrielle Goliath in discussion about monumentalization and questions around intimacy and embodiment.

Is it possible to publicly narrate the past, and document the present, in ways that move beyond permanence and monumentalization? What would it mean to think in terms of materiality not in relation to landscape but instead in terms of embodiment? 

Participants Ken Lum, Deborah Anzinger, and Gabrielle Goliath  addressed these questions and others in conversation with participants. Gabrielle Goliath drew from her work "Elegy 7" which can be viewed here.

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As always, Third Thursdays are free and open to the public   
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GABRIELLE GOLIATH

Gabrielle Goliath situates her practice within contexts marked by the traces, disparities and as of yet unreconciled traumas of colonialism and apartheid, as well as socially entrenched structures of patriarchal power and rape-culture. Enabling opportunities for affective, relational encounters, she seeks to resist the violence through which black, brown, feminine, queer and vulnerable bodies are routinely fixed through forms of representation. Goliath has exhibited widely, most recently in Our Red Sky, Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg. Her solo exhibition, This song is for... is currently installed at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, and will open later this year at Konsthall C, Stockholm. She will also present a new work in December 2020 by commission of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Goliath has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize/Special Prize (2019), the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), as well as the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including the TATE Modern, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate with the Institute for Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
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KEN
​LUM

Ken Lum is an internationally recognized contemporary artist, having participated in numerous important exhibitions such as Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Bienal and Whitney Biennial. A longtime professor, he currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia. He is co-founder and founding editor of the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. He is a prolific writer and has has been six times a keynote speaker at major events, including at the 2010 World Museums Conference in Shanghai, and the 2006 Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. A book of his writings titled Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life 1991 – 2018 was published in 2020 by Concordia University Press. Since the mid 1990s, Lum has worked on numerous major permanent public art commissions including for the cities of Vienna, Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto and Vancouver. Lum has a curatorial record including co-curating Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945; Sharjah Biennial 7, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates and Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia. Lum is the co-founder and Chief Curatorial Advisor to Monument Lab, a public art and history collective founded in Philadelphia
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DEBORAH ANZINGER

Deborah Anzinger is an artist and founder of New Local Space (NLS), Kingston, Jamaica. Anzinger’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) and has been exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, Brooklyn; National Art Gallery of the Bahamas; and National Gallery of Jamaica. Her work is published in Small Axe Journal (Duke University Press), Caribbean Quarterly (Taylor & Francis), Bomb Magazine, Art Papers, The New Yorker and Artforum. Anzinger was recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a fellowship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is a 2020 Soros Arts Fellow. As part of the Soros Arts Fellowship, Anzinger is creating archival arboreal sculptures called Training Stations in Maroon Town located in Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, an historical site of refuge from the Transatlantic slave trade for Maroons, and a major source of freshwater and biodiversity in the country. The title of the project references the Ground Truthing process used by the government to redefine the boundaries for mining operations and encroachment into The Cockpit Country Protected Area. Training Stations however proposes an alternative set of parameters to redefine the identity of this space based on the interconnectedness of land, ecologies, histories and lived realities.
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WEAPONIZING RESISTANCE

10/17/2020

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Feminist Filmmaking and the Representation of Muslim Women
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Photo by Nida Mahoob

A VCAM + ETHNOCINE COLLECTIVE MASTERCLASS

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OCT 17 AT 11AM

In this virtual masterclass on Saturday, October 17 at 11:00 am EST Ethnocine-Haverford Artists-in-Residence Seemab Gul and Nida Mehboob exploref the important role of feminism in Muslim countries, the often exploitative representation of South Asian/Afghan women in western media, and the ethics of collaboration and participation for documentary filmmakers, photographers and visual anthropologists.

The artists residency is a collaboration between VCAM and Ethnocine Collective, a group of visual anthropologists and filmmakers who push the boundaries of documentary storytelling through decolonial and intersectional feminist practice. The residency aims to strengthen the burgeoning field of feminist ethnographic filmmaking by supporting two underrepresented artists to claim the time, space, and a critically engaged community to move the needle forward on works-in-progress.

Organized by Ethnocine Collective & Haverford's VCAM, Co-sponsored by the Center for Experimental Ethnography and the Brown Girls Doc Mafia. 

Free and open to the public  
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PANDEMIC PEDAGOGIES

10/15/2020

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Teaching Embodied and Creative Practices at a Distance
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OCTOBER 15th at NOON

On October 15th, scholars, students, and members of the public joined together for our second Third Thursday gathering of the semester. We were privileged to discuss the course adjustments made in light of the pandemic, and lessons that CEE-Affiliated Faculty, John J. Jackson, Sharon Hayes, Jasmine Johnson, and Amitanshu Das have learned from them. Guiding questions included:
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What challenges have emerged in teaching performance and media-based courses remotely during the pandemic?
What have we learned about "liveness", about collaboration, about privacy, and about intimacy? 

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In this conversation, Sharon Hayes highlighted the ways she has been "prioritizing presence" throughout the course of the virtual semester, and Jasmine Johnson echoed this sentiment as she continues to navigate the "deep intimacy between constraint and possibility" that the pandemic has presented. The panelists emphasized how the pandemic has inspired them to find new ways to inject energy into what they do as instructors. We look forward to continued conversations about prioritizing "liveness" and promoting collaboration in remote multimodal explorations.
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MEET THE FELLOWS

9/17/2020

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On Sep. 17th, scholars, students, and members of the public joined together for the first virtual monthly lunch gathering of the semester. We introduced our Spring 2020 fellows, Christina Knight and Steven Feld, and they discussed their academic, creative, and ethnographic endeavors. Dr. Feld described how his undergraduate work in sound, text, and film work  led him to pursue avenues for legitimizing interdisciplinary and multimodal work in the academy, while Dr. Knight her academic, creative, and teaching efforts at the intersection of art and identity.
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MOTHERLESS CHILD

5/25/2020

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Virtual Screening of a music video from Guy Ramsey's "A Spiritual VIbe Vol. 1" album
Musiqology featuring Renaldo Maurice, dancer and Vince Anthony, vocals

FROM "A SPIRITUAL VIBE VOL 1"

"Motherless Child" features Vince Anthony on vocals, Guthrie Ramsey on keyboards, and is produced by Guthrie Ramsey and engineered by Doug Raus. 
This track is drawn from the new album by Guthrie Ramsey (Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music & CEE Affiliated Faculty UPENN) This project is dedicated to Rev. Dr. Leslie Callahan and Annabelle Callahan who have created a place to dream of a radical freedom that’s grounded in love at the St. Paul’s Baptist Church, Philadelphia
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PRECIOUS PLACES FILMS

4/21/2020

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 Thanks to the generosity of Scribe Video Center and the Precious Places Community History Project, we are excited to bring you  new short films by Philly community members  each week from April 20 through June 1! Each film will be available for one week only so make sure to catch it before its gone! Find the schedule below. 

These films are from Scribe Video Center's Precious Places Community History Project in the 2018 and 2019 seasons. Precious Places is a community oral history project inviting members of the Philadelphia region's many neighborhoods to document the buildings, public spaces, parks, landmarks and other sites that hold the memories of our communities and define where we live. Precious Places teaches the video production process to participating groups, fostering projects authored by those who intimately know the featured neighborhoods. 

Conceived as a way to allow neighborhood groups to celebrate their unique histories and as a tool to address current-day concerns, the Precious Places video documentaries explore the rich stories of our communities, the memories, and stories held in public spaces and community landmarks. They record community histories and help define where we live at a time when so many of the city's memories are undergoing so much change (Precious Places description from Scribe.Org 2020).
The Precious Places Community History Project is funded by The Independence Public Media Foundation, Comcast NBCUniversal Foundation, Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation, and The Alston Beech Foundation.

SCHEDULE OF SUMMER 2020 SCREENINGS

 WE ONE, THE LIFE AND LOVE OF NORRIS HOMES
April 20-27
(2019, 10:49 min)

 by Residents and Friends of Norris Homes in North Philadelphia 2019

We One: The Love and Life of Norris Homes. This film documents the history of a North Philadelphia public housing community affected by federal policy and is told from the perspective of former residents who lived at Norris going back to its earliest days in the 1950s.


PLENA AND BOMBA AT THE PUERTO RICAN INSTITUTE OF MUSIC
April 27-May 4
 (2019, 09:54 min)

by Instituto Puertorriqueño de
Música/Puerto Rican Institute of Music

Plena and Bomba at the Puerto Rican Institute of Music profiles the director and instructor of PRIM, Alberto Pagán-Ramírez, and his students, united by their love for Puerto Rican music and its deeply historical musical traditions, particularly Plena and Bomba music.


BUILD YOUR OWN DOOR --  ATKINSON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL  
May 4-11
(2018, 14:40 min)
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by the Hayti Historical Society 2019

In 1936, despite the ravages of segregation in Coatesville, PA, Dr. Whittier Cinclair Atkinson faced extraordinary challenges to build and successfully operate his own hospital. (00:13:10)


WHERE ART LIVES
May 11-18
(2018, 10:42 min) ​


by Paul Robeson House and the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance in West Philadelphia. 2018

Inspired by Paul Robeson, a man who used his artistic voice as an instrument against racism and oppression all over the world, the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance/Paul Robeson House & Museum from its namesake to its founding and its community programming symbolizes the man.


BETHEL BURYING GROUND
May 18-May 25
 (2018, 11:21 min)

by Bethel Burying Ground Production Team

An abandoned burial space, once owned by the historic Mother Bethel AME church, where more than 5,000 Black people were interred starting in 1810, was discovered. This is both an story of the struggle to reclaim the overlooked history of Black people in colonial Philadelphia, but also a story of the organizing, coalition building, and strategy employed by community members intent on preserving and memorializing what they termed as, "the ancestors of the African Diaspora.”


PLAYING IN THE WRECK
May 25-June 1
(2019, 09:15 min)

 by Grays Ferry Civic Association 

The 102-year old Vare Recreation Center, a decaying landmark in the Gray's Ferry neighborhood of South Philly, is a beacon of youth programming for a community navigating its own unique challenges and triumphs.

RESILIENT ROOTS COMMUNITY FARM
June 1-8
(2019, 09:13 min)

by VietLEAD 

Resilient Roots in East Camden was started as an intergenerational project between Vietnamese elder refugees and multi-ethnic youth in 2012. In this film, voices from the Resilient Roots family, community members, students, elders capture their history of Camden and give testimony to the importance of community control of land and schools.
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We One, the Love and Life of Norris Homes (2019, 10:49 min)

4/21/2020

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Film still from "We Are One, the Love and Life of Norris Homes" (2019)
"People may move, but they don't leave Norris."
 
Join us this week in watching We One, the Love and Life of Norris Homes by members of the Norris Homes community.  It documents the history of a North Philadelphia public housing community affected by federal policy and is told from the perspective of former residents who lived at Norris going back to its earliest days in the 1950’s. The film will be available for the next seven days, until Monday the 27th of April. 


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PENN MUSEUM 336
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
PHILADELPHIA, PA 19104

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