{"id":599,"date":"2023-09-12T18:53:40","date_gmt":"2023-09-12T18:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/cema\/?page_id=599"},"modified":"2026-10-19T21:57:52","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T21:57:52","slug":"events","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/cema\/events\/","title":{"rendered":"Events"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
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CEMA hosts workshops and public screenings that feature visiting artists at the forefront of the audiovisual field. Free and open to the public, these events bring together the USC and local community, fostering dialogue and knowledge exchange<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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\n\n \n Workshop with Jordan Cronk<\/span>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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\n Landscapes of Resistance \n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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In this workshop, film critic and programmer Jordan Cronk will discuss his approach to criticism and curation, and how the two practices inform one another. Participants will be given texts by various journalists and programmers about the works in the accompanying shorts program and will be asked to share a written reflection on a film of their choice. A conversation will then take place about the program\u2019s themes of portraiture, landscape, and historical memory, followed by considerations of the participant\u2019s texts and a larger discussion about how the people working in each of these fields approach artists\u2019 cinema and its place in the current festival ecosystem.<\/p>\n

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Friday, October\u00a023, 2026<\/strong>
\n10:30\u00a0AM – 1:30\u00a0PM<\/strong><\/p>\n

USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex – Room SCA 255
\n900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007<\/p>\n

FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.<\/p>\n

RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu<\/strong><\/p>\n

This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and USC School for Cinematic Arts\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n

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\n\n \n Film Screening<\/span>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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\n Short Films Programmed by Jordan Cronk\n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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We are excited to welcome\u00a0acclaimed film critic, programmer, and founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series, JORDAN CRONK<\/strong>,\u00a0<\/strong>to the Center for Ethnographic Media Arts\u00a0<\/strong>as part of CEMA’s Visiting Artist Series.<\/p>\n

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SHORTS PROGRAM<\/strong><\/p>\n

This Is My Land<\/em> (Ben Rivers, 2006, 14 min)<\/strong><\/p>\n

A hand-processed portrait of Jake Williams, who lives alone within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Jake always has many jobs on at any one time, finds a use for everything, is an expert mandolin player, and has compost heaps going back many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders. It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working – I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and be apart from the idea of industry – Jake’s life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn\u2019t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future. \u2014Ben Rivers<\/p>\n

“The red filter is withdrawn.”<\/em> (Minjung Kim, 2020, 12 min)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Numerous colonial places including coastal cave and military bunkers, as well as memories of uprising and massacres are everywhere on Jeju Island. The film is based on Ren\u00e9 Magritte’s ‘La Condition Humaine’. The camera captures the landscape of caves and bunkers on Jeju Island, with the text from Hollis Frampton\u2019s “A Lecture\u201d, and asks the meaning of capturing and showing landscape through the media.<\/p>\n

Barbs, Wastelands<\/em> (Marta Mateus, 2017, 25 min)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the end of the 19th century the peasants in Portugal started a courageous struggle for better work conditions. After generations of starving misery, the Carnation Revolution sowed the promise of an Agrarian Reform. Mostly in the Alentejo region, these rural workers occupied the huge properties where they were once submitted to the power of their Masters. Perhaps the lost seed of other fruits\u2026 It is said in Alentejo, when something is lost, those who are looking should start to walk back to the beginning. We must pray and ask Saint Lucy to clear our vision, so we can see and look better. The protagonists of this film, resistants of this struggle, many of them illiterate, working since childhood, tell their story to the youngsters of today, in their own words.<\/p>\n

Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary <\/em>(Sky Hopinka, 2017, 13 min)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The title of this video, taken from the texts of the architect Kengo Kuma, suggests a way of looking at everything as \u201cinterconnected and intertwined\u201d – such as the historical and the present and the tool and the artifact. Images and representations of two structures in the Portland Metropolitan Area that have direct and complicated connections to the Chinookan people who inhabit(ed) the land are woven with audio tapes of one of the last speakers of chinuk wawa, the Chinookan creole. These localities of matter resist their reduction into objects,\u00a0and call anew for space and time given to wandering as a deliberate act, and the empowerment of shared utility.<\/p>\n

Parsi<\/em> (Eduardo Williams, 2019, 24 min)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Innovatively shot on a 360-degree camera by young people from Guinea-Bissau\u2019s queer and trans community, this breathlessly immersive work from the director The Human Surge <\/em>sets a perpetually expanding poem by Mariano Blatt to a kinetic vision of their world.<\/p>\n

Jordan Cronk\u00a0in-person with a discussion to follow the films.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thursday, October 22, 2026<\/strong>
\nDoors at 6:30\u00a0PM, film\u00a0begins at 7:00\u00a0PM.
\nRuntime 88\u00a0min.<\/p>\n

USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex – Room SCI 106<\/p>\n

900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007<\/p>\n

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FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.<\/p>\n

RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu<\/strong><\/p>\n

This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and USC School for Cinematic Arts\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n

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\n\n \n Film Screening<\/span>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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\n LONDON\n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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LONDON<\/em> a film by Sebastian Brameshuber<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bobby drives back and forth between Vienna and Salzburg, picking up strangers along the way and sharing conversations that drift from the everyday to the deeply personal. In this tender portrait of today\u2019s Europe, anonymity and warmth still go hand in hand.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sebastian Brameshuber\u00a0in-person with a discussion to follow the film.<\/p>\n

Friday, September 25th, 2026<\/strong>
\nDoors at 4:30\u00a0PM, film\u00a0begins at 5:00\u00a0PM.
\nRuntime 124 min.<\/p>\n

USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex
\n900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007<\/p>\n

FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.<\/p>\n

RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu<\/strong><\/p>\n

This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts, USC School of Cinematic Arts, and the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n

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\n\n \n A workshop with Sebastian Brameshuber<\/span>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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\n THE PRESENT, THE ABSENT\n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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How can a place become visible through the everyday conversations of the people who inhabit it? In this workshop, participants\u00a0collaboratively explore how a film about their shared experience might emerge from fragments collected across campus. How far can the idea of a \u201cconversation\u201d be pushed\u2014into memory, imagination, silence, presence, and absence? Letting the process shape the form, the workshop invites participants to find and create scenes on camera that delineate the place as much by what is withheld as by what is shown.<\/span>

Thursday, September 24th, 2026<\/strong>
10:00\u00a0AM – 5:00\u00a0PM<\/strong>

Space in this workshop is limited.\u00a0<\/strong>RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu<\/strong><\/p>\n

This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n\n

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\n\n \n Artist Talk <\/span>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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\n ATMOSPHERES with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay\n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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Atomspheres is a series of performances on elemental listening engagement and meditative environmental attunement, leading to a participatory performance with the co-listeners. The performances attune to the macro-scale crises of the climate and ecology in a planetary context and bridges its intersection with micro-level coping strategies to the crises in a regenerative gathering. The performances resonate with the tradition of free improvisation as well as communal and participatory sonic gatherings for affective and discursive engagement with crises and conflict, practiced in many Global Souths cultures. These performance gatherings involve field recordings of climate variables like wind, water, and woods, comprovised by chance generative processes, accompanied by radio interferences transducing situated weather patterns, weaved together by meditative instrumental interventions of traditional instruments, as well as live electronics and algorithmic interpretation of data and assemblages embracing free improvisational techniques and ethos. As an invocation, the series invites the co-listeners into an exercise of slow listening and slow breathing that try to suspend time, control, ego, and individuality to tap into a humbler mode of fatalism and a distributed self-hood. This philosophical positioning stresses the subjugation of events or actions to fate or destiny and is commonly associated with an attitude of acceptance in the face of future events, which are thought to be inevitable. This approach manifests into yielding control by an emergent form of togetherness, intersubjectivity, and kinship when listening transcends an overt causality, and the psychosomatic condition embraces slow breathing to contemplate, and affective attunement. The project is inspired by the micro-level entanglements of human, more-than-human, and other life forms in a survival context, and explores sensory transduction of environmental conditions to figure how to make them post-immersive and attuning experiences in an openly circular, collaborative performance setting.
\nThursday, April 2nd, 2026<\/strong>
\n7:30 – 8:30\u00a0PM<\/strong><\/p>\n

USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex
\nRoom SCA 120A
\n900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007<\/p>\n

FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.<\/p>\n

RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and USC School of Cinematic Arts.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\n\n \n CEMA Visiting Artist Calendar <\/span>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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\n Spring 2026 Visiting Artist Series \n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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Featuring: Su Friedrich, Raven Jackson, Diana Allen, and Budhaditya Chattopadhyay. <\/strong><\/div>\n
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Email CEMA@USC.EDU<\/a>\u00a0to join our mailing list and find out more information about each event.\u00a0We look forward to seeing you!<\/div>\n
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\n Don’t miss out on future events\n <\/h2>\n\n\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n
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\n\n \n \n \n\n Join our Mailing List \n <\/svg>\n<\/a>\n\n\n<\/div>\n \n \n
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