Ethnographic Landscapes: Talk with J.P. Sniadecki & Cristiana Strava | 12 March 2024 | 19:15 | EYE Film Museum (Amsterdam)
ReCNTR x Eye
During their Paravel & Castaing-Taylor: Cosmic Realism exhibition (20 January – 20 May 2024), Eye Filmmuseum is collaborating with ReCNTR on a number of talks and screenings that are taking place as part of the exhibition’s accompanying programme.
Eye Filmmuseum is the Dutch national museum for film. Their exhibition showcases the works of Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, pioneering filmmakers who are reinventing the relationship between anthropology and cinema with their formally innovative nonfiction filmmaking. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor are closely associated with Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, which was founded by Castaing-Taylor in 2006.
Over the coming months, ReCNTR, in various capacities, will be involved in the accompanying programme of this landmark exhibition.
Event Description
As part of Eye Filmmuseum’s regular strand Eye on Art, ReCNTR is co-presenting the talk “Ethnographic Landscapes” by J.P. Sniadecki, which will be followed by a conversation moderated by ReCNTR co-director Cristiana Strava.
In a talk that will include film and audio extracts, Sniadecki and Strava’s conversation will touch on the subject of landscapes, visual excavation, and material inscriptions. Discussing both El Mar la Mar (co-directed with Joshua Bonnetta, 2017) and Foreign Parts (co-directed with Véréna Paravel, 2010), both of which will also screen at Eye Filmmuseum on 12 March, Sniadecki and Strava will explore collaboration, the relations between stories and images, and the materiality of different media from analogue, to digital, and audio documentation.
J.P. Sniadecki will be visiting the Netherlands to take part in the first meeting of the ReCNTR Lab, the multimodal research workshop ReCNTR is organising with a KIEM grant, as our invited external researcher. The closed workshop will take place on 13-15 March.
J.P. Sniadecki is a filmmaker, anthropologist, and professor of documentary media at Northwestern University in Chicago. His films, which include Demolition / Chaiqian (2008), Foreign Parts (with Verena Paravel, 2010), People’s Park (with Libbie Cohn, 2012), Yumen (with Huang Xiang and Xu Ruotao, 2013), The Iron Ministry (2014) and El Mar la Mar (with Joshua Bonetta, 2017), have won many awards at festivals around the world. His work has been featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennale, the 2014 Shanghai Biennale, the UCCA in Beijing, The MoMA, The Guggenheim, The Museum of Natural History in New York, and a special section of BIFF 2012. He is an alumnus of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL).
Cristiana Strava, co-director of ReCNTR, is an anthropologist at Leiden University trained at Harvard University and SOAS. She has a broad interest in urban spaces, economic inequality, and the politics of planning and development regimes, and has experience living and carrying out research in North and West Africa.
Ticket prices: Standard (€12.50), Student (€10), Cineville (free)
Tickets and further details
