SSMF 2022: “Pause”

Time & Temporality

How does pause bend perceptions of space? How does pause reshape relationships between communities and the spaces they inhabit? The projects in this panel shed light on how spaces seem to expand or contract with prolonged pauses, and how those rhythms transform collective rituals and ways of being.

Moderated by Kinjal Dave, University of Pennsylvania
Saturday, March 26, 1:30 PM — 2:45 PM Eastern

Panel Recording

Shadow of Love

Khari Eyen Zamé Johnson

Shadows of Love examines the legacy of black life in Washington DC and reckons with the passage of time. Much of my work deals with the concept of time-displacement and physical displacement. The COVID-19 Pandemic has furthered the displacement of time, there a several blocks filled with boarded up businesses that may never return. The entropic nature of time effects all residents of a city, as space expands and contracts people are displaced and replaced. Using the imagery captured on 35mm film, I seek to create videos that will act as time capsules. The images include residents from all walks of life artist and pedestrians all weaving into the fabric of time. This short film depicts what is quickly being lost. Over the last two years images that I shot are all that remain of parts of locations that are now being remolded into new spaces.

From Khari Eyen Zamé Johnson: My visual art unrolls history as an unyielding reel of life in our dynamic struggle through the constant movement of time and space. In my process Archeology represents unearthing forgotten eras. Film is my medium articulating abstract and concrete thoughts, gleaning light from embers of the past to spark memories.

Read Letters and Asynchronous Perspectives

Juan Castrillón
University of Pennsylvania

Fukuda Pero
Ritsumeikan University

Read Letters and Asynchronous Perspectives is a film in progress that features a sounding image correspondence between Juan Castrillón and Fukuda Pero’s research among Cubeo Emi-Hehenewa and Batwa worlds in the Northwestern Amazon and Central Africa. The film explores how the encounter between indigenous and non-indigenous audiovisualities happens asynchronously, indexing different tenses, and opening gaps for other evaluations to emerge; in which heard voices, fluid pronouns, blurred and moved images can redefine the textures where they make sense.

Juan Castrillón is the inaugural Gilbert Seldes Multimodal Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication. His research dialogues with contemporary debates about decoloniality, visual and sound/music cultures, and indigenous analytics of the person, magic, and technology.

Fukuda Pero is a multimodal anthropologist, poet and artist currently enrolled in a PhD program at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. Employing various modes of expression, viz.: text, drawing, photography, film to installation, his research questions reality and how they are collectively constructed. Winner of Experimental Film Award at the Manchester International Film Festival 2016 and highly commended by Forward Prize for Poetry 2020.

Little Pakistan – Future Histories

Sana Akram
The New School

Little Pakistan – Future Histories is a dérive—a drifting in an online environment illustrating an immigrant neighborhood of Pakistani-Americans across three eras. Each era has its own rhythm—with three sets of youth engaged in transformative acts of inhabitation, organizing, and resilience, taking Little Pakistan from an ethnic enclave to a concept spreading across Brooklyn, New York City and beyond.

The interactive-documentary encourages the audience to overlap oral histories and walk-along interviews conducted with six community protagonists and collaborate with them for a rediscovery of Little Pakistan, where listening to, watching, acknowledging, understanding, and celebrating local histories unravels an Ensemble of Meanings across Space, Time, and Generations.

Sana Akram is an urbanist and a new media documentary maker from Pakistan. In 2020, she graduated from Parsons School of Design, The New School, as a Fulbright alum. Her research-practice interests lie at the convergence of urban narrative, collective memory & place, the future imaginary, new media, emerging technologies and cocreation.
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