International Critics Prize

Leviathan and the Sensory Ethnography Lab

This post comes to you from Cultura21

Leviathan, a documentary film about fishing ships in the Northern Atlantic, by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, won the international critics’ prize at the Locarno Film Festival. I could see it, thanks to Mark Peranson and Bettina Steinbrügge, and indeed, I pass you on the recommendation to go and see this work, which achieves “an immersive cinematic experience […] with small, waterproof digital cameras that were variously tethered to the fishermen, tossed in with their dead or dying catch and plunged into the roiling ocean” as described in a New York Times article (click here to read).

Castaing-Taylor’s approach to filming, which is inspired by life’s unpredictability, is also at the core of the “Sensory Ethnography Lab” at Harvard University, which “supports innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography that deploy original media practices to explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal existence, and the aesthetics and ontology of the natural world. Harnessing perspectives drawn from the arts, the human sciences, and the humanities, works produced in the SEL encourage attention to the many dimensions of life and the world that m

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Powered by WPeMatico