Middleear

“Aesthetics of Breath” is the new episode of the SMRN podcast channel I recorded with my colleague and talented filmmaker and curator Kalpana Subramanian. The episode was published by Creative Disturbance, an international online platform of The ArtSciLab of The University of Texas at Dallas. The episode explores non-Western genealogies of breath in connection with notions of subjectivity, affectivity and becoming.

Find it here https://creativedisturbance.org/podcast/aesthetics-of-breath-a-conversation-between-juan-castrillon-and-kalpana-subramanian/

Visit the Substantial Motion Research Network (SMRN) at www.substantialmotion.org

Volume 16, Number 1: Music and Theory

We are pleased to announce the publication of SEM Student News Volume 16, Number 1. This issue discusses new and reimagined conceptualizations of theories from many areas and traditions, and highlights student voices as they shape theoretical engagements in current and future fieldwork, social activism, and ethnomusicological academia.

You can read the issue here.

“Experiments on New Organology: Performing Research in a Multimedial Exhibit” p, 32-35.

In April 17, 2020, the communication office of the University of Pennsylvania featured the multimodal exhibit “Re-Covering the Ney Collection” under the subtopic of archaeology. According to the review, the “pre-planned web exhibit has become one of the limited opportunities to visit a museum right now—prompting professors to assign it to their students, and enticing people from all over to scroll their way through a virtual trip.” Read more here.

Indigenous Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Musicology presents:

Film Screening of ~KİRAİÑİA (Long Flutes) and discussion with the director

Time: Tuesday January 21^st at 14:00–15:00

Place: Vuorikatu 5, h144, ground floor

University of Helsinki

REHAVI (Timekeepers) will be screened at Cinemística International Film Festival. The screening will take place at Corrala de Santiago on November 27 at 19:30h in Granada, Spain. 

Rehavi (Timekeepers) is the story of an old migrant watch lost, found and circulated by different owners. The film presents a contemporary view of the profound philosophy of time and the homology between clocks and human beings, which have been some of the main themes of Muslim spirituality in Anatolia.

Rehavi (Timekeepers) is the third audiovisual text released by Juan Castrillon about his research on Sufi Music in Istanbul. The film combines narrative and interviews as a way of crafting a style of ethnographic storytelling.

~Kiraiñia (Long Flutes) is an essay film about how an instrument sounds like. The film is a deep immersion into the process of remaking instruments and affects in an Amazonian community living in the Uaupés River Valley in Southern Colombia. The film renders the resilience of the Emi-Hehenewa community to assemble emotion and memory out of a recent present in which their ritual and expressive practices were prohibited and pulled them apart by Catholic and Protestant missionaries during the mid-nineteen fifties. In its essayistic gesture, the film puts together broken pieces of the everyday shared by this community and an ethnomusicologist in their common attempt to remember and retell how these instruments sound like.

The film came out from an ethnographic research project in Lowland South America. From its scholarship approach, the film breaks the factual perspective of ethnomusicological films about musical instruments by opening a cinematic dialogue informed by Emi-Hehenewa nonlinear linking and storytelling. And on the other hand, it re-pairs the multilingual and perspectival exchange between indigenous and non-indigenous audiences as part of an ethical commitment to co-produce new media affordances for world making.

~KİRAİÑİA (Long Flutes)
36:02 min, Pamie and Spanish with English subtitles.
Juan Castrillón. United States, 2019.

~KIRAIÑIA (Long Flutes) was selected to participate at the symposium “Film as Ethnography, Activism, and Public Work in Ethnomusicology” at the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) in Indiana University in Bloomington, November 6th, 2019. This essay film stands as one of three ethnographic artifacts of a doctoral dissertation in Ethnomusicology.

Yuruparí Stereo: Exchange of Listenings, Digital Media and Repatriation of Indigenous Musical Archives in Uaupes.

Abstract

During the last three decades Amerindian communities living in the southeastern region of Colombia have been receiving copies of sound recordings made by foreign scholars at the beginning and mid twentieth century. Some of the reasons why these recordings are gaining public attention include the legal status’ indeterminacy regarding indigenous notions of copyrights and ownership, and its emerging value of indigeneity promoted by the UNESCO and Colombia’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism.

In 2016, Yuruparí Estereo, a grassroots radio station broadcasted many of these recordings through a listening experiment featuring twelve episodes about the recent history of indigenous musical practices in Vaupés with detailed explanations in Cubeo and Spanish languages about voice, linguistic exogamy and the construction of musical instruments. Even though these contents were not novel to Tukanoan and non-Tukanoan audiences living in Mitú, the way they became to be listened by indigenous audiences underscores a completely new scenario in which the idea of music repatriation intended by different scholars was transfigured. Especially because the way each episode was assembled rendered the media analytics Tukanoans considered as appropriate for circulating sound, emotion, and information about practices of musicking among indigenous and non-indigenous audiences. 

Following recent discussions on sonic archives in ethnomusicology, the paper analyzes how this experiment came to amplify and relocate indigenous points of listening. Through this relocation, the historical value these recordings may have was taken by means of transformation to feed indigenous sociocosmological calendars; thus, enhancing an audible world in which voices, sounds, scenarios, and people are in constantly becoming.

International Symposium UNIANDES

 

~Kiraiñia (Long Flutes) is an essay film about how an instrument sounds like. The film is a deep immersion into the process of remaking instruments and affects in an Amazonian community living in the Uaupés River Valley in Southern Colombia. The film renders the resilience of the Emi-Hehenewa community to assemble emotion and memory out of a recent present in which their ritual and expressive practices were prohibited and pulled them apart by Catholic and Protestant missionaries during the mid-nineteen fifties. In its essayistic gesture, the film puts together broken pieces of the everyday shared by this community and an ethnomusicologist in their common attempt to remember and retell how these instruments sound like.

The film came out from an ethnographic research project in Lowland South America. From its scholarship approach, the film breaks the factual perspective of ethnomusicological films about musical instruments by opening a cinematic dialogue informed by Emi-Hehenewa nonlinear linking and storytelling. And on the other hand, it re-pairs the multilingual and perspectival exchange between indigenous and non-indigenous audiences as part of an ethical commitment to co-produce new media affordances for world-making.

~KİRAİÑİA (Long Flutes)
36:02 min, Pamie, and Spanish with English subtitles.
Juan Castrillón. United States, 2019.