The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) is an experimental laboratory that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography. It uses analog and digital media, installation, and performance, to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world. Harnessing perspectives drawn from the arts, the social and natural sciences, and the humanities, SEL encourages attention to the many dimensions of the world, both animate and inanimate, that may only with difficulty, if it all, be rendered with words. The SEL is directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor.
The work produced through SEL in film, video, photography, phonography, and installation has been presented in universities and academic conferences across the world. It has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, documenta, the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, British Museum, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, the Berlin Kunsthalle, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, Shanghai Biennale, Aichi Triennale, PS1, MASS MoCA, MAMM Medellin, and the Whitechapel Gallery. Films and videos produced in SEL have been selected for Berlin, Locarno, New York, Toronto, Venice, and other film festivals.
Featured Projects
De Humani Corporis Fabrica Five centuries ago, Andreas Vesalius opened the human body up to a scientific gaze, marking the inception of modern anatomy. This film seeks to open up the human body to cinema. Our flesh appears as a landscape of unknown forms, which, like all landscapes, subsists only thanks to the attention — by turns benevolent and maleficent — of others. Hospitals emerge not only as spaces of suffering and care, but as laboratories that link all the world's bodies. The film is a hymn to life, and to death. |
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Dry Ground Burning When the flare lights up the night sky, that is how they know the gasoline is ready for sale, the men on the motorbikes who collect the canisters from the fearless Chitara, her sister Léa and their all-female gang, the sample fuel still burning out on the ground. From the watchtower of their makeshift oil refinery, you can see the lights of Brasília in the distance, although Sol Nascente, one of the continent's biggest favelas, is a world unto itself, a real setting still ineluctably cinematic. The arid landscape and merciless shootings conjure up the atmosphere of a Western or even a heist movie, although the fortified police car that patrols the streets seems straight out of science fiction. When the women bump and grind on the bus, dance at a block party or chant slogans on their political party's election truck, it is difficult not to think of a musical too, albeit one with a healthy dollop of queerness. Yet one genre hits harder than all the rest, and the power of documentary should never be underestimated. Lived-in locations, unstaged protests against Bolsonaro, non-professional actors playing versions of themselves: when you peel away the fiction, there is nothing like real life. Berlinale 2022.
https://thefilmstage.com/berlin-review-dry-ground-burning-is-a-fulminating-engrossing-paean-to-the-marginalized-in-bolsonaros-brazil/ |
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Huahua's Dazzling World and its Myriad Temptations [Huahua shijie]
Huahua, an eccentric and exuberant woman from Xiongan New Area, livestreams herself dancing, singing, and chatting with fans on Kuaishou for a living. Cell phone screens, beauty filters, and digital soundscapes reveal a world that Huahua creates with her own image. Cinéma du Réel 2022. |
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The A-Team Over the phone, thirteen former classmates reminisce about their Ghanaian high school's exchange trip to Jackson, Mississippi, USA a decade earlier. But the more they remember, the stranger it becomes. Comprised of a mix of black and blurry images, the visuals mimic the group's memory blocks and uncertainties, as well as those moments that they struggle to confront from the present day. |
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[How] Will We Live [Together]? Leading thinkers try their hardest to answer this unanswerable question. Interviewees include Kwame Anthony Appiah, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret, Amitav Ghosh, Stephen Greenblatt, Olivia Judson, Bruno Latour, Mariana Mazzucato, Joia Mukherjee, Mary Robinson, Dani Rodrick, Saskia Sassen, and Richard Sennett. Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. |
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Expedition Content An immersive marvel of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller as part of the so-called Harvard-Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea in 1961 to study the indigenous Hubula (also known as Dani) people. In their nearly imageless film, Karel and Kusumaryati document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The work explores and upends the power dynamics between anthropologist and subject, between image and sound, and turns the whole ethnographic project on its head. New York Times Critic's Pick. Berlinale 2020. http://ek.klingt.org/expeditioncontent http://www.cinemaguild.com/theatrical/expeditioncontent.html |
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Caniba |
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Commensal |
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somniloquies |
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La Libertad
https://mubi.com/films/la-libertad-2017 |
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Sol Negro Like the black sun of an eclipse, Antonia is a lyrical singer of exuberant and dark beauty. Recovering from a suicide attempt in a rehabilitation institution, all her family ties are irreparably broken. But her sister remains deeply affected by what happened. May they reunite once again? The work of Colombian-French artist Laura Huertas Millán moves gently across disciplines, defying categorization. One of her self-termed “ethnographic fictions,” Black Sun is a mysterious and immersive inquiry into despair, family bonds, and the power of female resilience.
https://mubi.com/films/sol-negro |
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Linefork |
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Lampedusa A multi-layered narrative of a past event--the sudden appearance and disappearance of a volcanic island off the southern coast of Sicily in 1831--intersects with contemporary Mediterranean itineraries and possibilities. |
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Ah humanity! Ah humanity! reflects on the fragility and folly of humanity in the age of the Anthropocene. Taking the 3/11/11 disaster of Fukushima as its point of departure, it evokes an apocalyptic vision of modernity, and our predilection for historical amnesia and futuristic flights of fancy. The images were shot on a telephone through a handheld telescope, at once close to and far from its subject, while the audio composition combines empty excerpts from Japanese genbaku and related film soundtracks, audio recordings from seismic laboratories, and location sound. |
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Into the Hinterlands The Hinterlands, a Detroit-based performance ensemble, practice a form of ecstatic training which they see as a provocation towards the unknown — a space both physical and imaginary whose mystery is its source of generation and from which their creativity emerges. Their practice is one of ecstatic play, of finding the edge of one's balance, and the limits of one's body.
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THE IRON MINISTRY Filmed over three years on what will soon be the world's largest railway network, THE IRON MINISTRY traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, and language and gesture.
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The Figures Carved Into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees The rapid turning of a light draws a circle. In the space bound by its line unravels an archive of postcards sent between the island of Madeira and the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique. The figures carved into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees circulates between a fictional colonial memory, and science-fiction.
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Single Stream Blurring the line between observation and abstraction, SINGLE STREAM plunges the viewer into the steady flow of the plant and the waste it treats, examining the material consequences of our society's culture of excess. The title refers to the method of recycling in which all types of recyclables are initially gathered together, and sorted later at a specialized facility. Inside a cavernous building, a vast machine complex runs like clock-work, sorting a steady stream of glass, metal, paper and plastic carried on conveyor belts criss-crossing the space, dotted with workers in neon vests. This complex ballet of man, machine and movement produces sounds and images that are overwhelming, but also beautiful, and revelatory.
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MANAKAMANA Pilgrims make an ancient journey in a state-of-the-art cable car. Their rides unfold in real-time, highlighting interactions with one another, the landscape, and this strange new mode of conveyance. Through these encounters, the film opens a surprising window onto contemporary Nepali lives, propelled along by the country's idiosyncratic modernization.
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Yumen YUMEN combines ghost stories and "ruin porn" to form a celluloid psycho-collage of wandering souls seeking connection with one another and a lost collective history among the frozen remnants of the abandoned oil town of Yumen in China's northwest Gansu province. More Information
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Bedding Down A crepuscular pastoral.
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Coom Biddy Shear, v. To cut, divide, shear, shave.
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Leviathan
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People's Park More Information
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Still Life |