Far from Philadelphia
Dec. 6, 2024
Widener Hall, Penn Museum, UPENN
Five narratives developed in the class "Footage Films", that re-assemble archives of campus protest, Penn Museum collections, university weapons development projects, the Schuylkill river, a utopia called Shangri-La, and their intersections across time and place.
*Recalling Far From Vietnam, collectively-made essay film from 1967.
Video and sonic works with live elements. 90 mins including Q and A.
by Alvin Luong, Ambika Trasi, Dylan Li, Nipun Kottage, Nora Wang. with 2024 CEE Fellows, CAMP
In 1967, a group of filmmakers including Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda and Jean-Luc Godard made an essay film mostly from collected materials, titled Far From Vietnam. In it, they articulated the stakes for humanity, and their own stakes, at a distance, in the war in Vietnam. Stakes that are in Gaza today, and still in Vietnam.
This title recalls war at a distance, but also solidarity. We invert this collective gaze towards Penn and Philly institutions, movements, geographies, and our cohort's own recent experiences. We asked how local archives of protest, museum collections from far or near places, university histories of its own participation in past wars, the mapping and overflowing of the Schuylkill river, the deployment in literature, cinema and real estate of a place and utopia called Shangri-La, intersect with and effect other places and contexts.
These are projects of relinking, rebuilding and "rear-guard" art, by an international and transdisciplinary group from a university, and a re-oriented Philadelphia, where such questions uniquely intersect. The evening marks the end of a semester with CEE Fellows CAMP (Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran), and their course: Footage Films, or Narrating a Dataset: 100 days without our own images.
