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.

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.