Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard University http://sel.fas.harvard.

edu/

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.

Selected Projects

Caniba
Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
An online sensory ethnography journal for
2017, audio-video, 90 minutes
media production and criticism:
Caniba reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalistic desire in human existence through sensatejournal.com
the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun
Sagawa. As a 32-year-old student at the Sorbonne in Paris, Issei Sagawa was arrested on June 13,
1981 when spotted emptying two bloody suitcases containing the remains of his Dutch classmate,
Renée Hartevelt. Two days earlier, Mr. Sagawa had killed Hartevelt and began eating her. Declared
legally insa ne, he returned to Japan. He has been a free man ever since. Ostracized from society,
he has made his living off his crime by writing novels, drawing manga, appearing in innumerable
documentaries and sexploitation films in which he reenacts his crime, and even becoming a food
critic. Now old and infirm, he reflects back on “the incident,” as he calls, it, and his desire to end his
days in the mouth of a fellow cannibal. Venice Biennale 2017.

Commensal
Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2017, 2-channel film and video installation: 16 mm film
transferred from 8 mm film and digital video. Film: color
and black-and-white, silent, 42 minutes. Video: color,
sound, 27 minutes
A portrait of Issei Sagawa and his brother Jun Sagawa reading Issei’s manga in which he depicts Zeega
his killing of René Hartevelt, counterposed to family film footage of their childhood in Japan.
documenta 14. Zeega is an open-source HTML5 platform for creating
interactive documentaries, open archives and inventing
new forms of storytelling.

Zeega makes it easy to collaboratively produce, curate

and publish participatory multimedia projects online, on
mobile devices and in physical spaces.

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somniloquies
Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2017, audio-video, 73 minutes
A wild orgy, a mass drowning, a dwarf city for rent, a surgical operation that goes tragically awry, a
baroque mansion for sale that doubles up as a torture chamber, a de-pressurized Experiment Hall
that causes ladies’ fingernail polish to fly off their nails… such were the nocturnal dramas of the
world’s most garrulous sleep-talker. An American lyricist who yearned for a career on Broadway,
Dion McGregor dreamed out loud while his New York roommate recorded him over seven years in
the 1960s. In somniloquies, McGregor’s nightly musings are coupled with images of sleeping nudes.
A roving camera that moves indiscernibly from one contour and orifice to another, one body to
another, one gender to another, one ethnicity to another, one animal to another. documenta 14.

Linefork
Jeff Silva and Vic Rawlings
2016, DCP, 96 minutes
An immersive meditation on the passage of time and the persistent resonance of place, Linefork
follows the daily rituals of an elderly couple living in Kentucky's Appalachian Mountains. Now well
into his eighties, Lee Sexton is the last living link to the distant past of a regional American music. A
retired coal miner with black lung, Lee and his wife, Opal, continue to farm the land where he was
born. Together they face encroaching health concerns and stark economic realities. Recorded over
three years, Linefork is an observational film documenting their marriage, their community, their
resilience, and the raw yet delicate music of an unheralded banjo legend, linked to the past yet
immediately present.

www.linefork.com

Lampedusa
Philip Cartelli and Mariangela Ciccarello
2015, DCP, color and black & white, 5.1, 14 minutes
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.

Ah humanity!
Ernst Karel, Véréna Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2015, audio-video installation, 4.1, 23 minutes
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.

Into the Hinterlands

Julia Yezbick
2015, DCP, 39 minutes
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.

www.intothehinterlands.com

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THE IRON MINISTRY

J.P. Sniadecki
2014, HD video, color, 5.1 surround sound, 83 minutes
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.

www.theironministry.com

The Figures Carved Into the Knife by the Sap of the

Banana Trees
Joana Pimenta
2014, DCP, 16 minutes
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.

Single Stream
Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Kim Lee, and Ernst Karel
2014, DCP CinemaScope and 5.1 audio, 23 min.
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.

www.single-stream.net/

MANAKAMANA
Stephanie Spray, and Pacho Velez
2013, 35mm and DCP, 95 min
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.

www.manakamanafilm.com

Yumen
Xu Ruotao, J.P. Sniadecki, and Huang Xiang
2013, 65 mins.
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

Bedding Down
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2012, audio-video, 35mm and HD digital video, 6 mins.
A crepuscular pastoral.

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Coom Biddy
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2012, audio-video, 35mm and HD digital video, 8 mins.

Shear, v. To cut, divide, shear, shave.

Leviathan
Véréna Paravel
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2012, 35mm and DCP, 87 mins.
In the very waters where Melville’s Pequod gave chase to Moby Dick, Leviathan captures the
collaborative clash of man, nature, and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras — tossed and tethered,
passed from fisherman to filmmaker — it is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.

www.leviathanfilm.org

People's Park
J.P. Sniadecki, Libbie Dina Cohn
2012, DCP, 75 mins.
A single-shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through a famous urban
park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The film explores the dozens of moods, rhythms and pockets
of performance coexisting in tight proximity within the park’s prismatic social space, capturing
waltzing couples, mighty sycamores, karaoke singers, and buzzing cicadas. A sensory meditation
on cinematic time and space, People’s Park offers a gaze at public interaction, leisure and self-
expression in China.

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Materials Recovery Facility

Ernst Karel
2012, streaming audio, duration variable
A sound work recorded at the materials recovery facility run by Casella Waste Systems, in the
Charlestown area of northern Boston, which receives truckloads of commingled recyclables from
surrounding municipalities and universities. Fed through the facility on a network of massive
overlapping conveyor belts, the materials are separated for recycling using automated methods
including trommels, disc screens, optical sensors, precisely directed blasts of compressed air,
eddy currents, magnets, and a large staff of human workers, who manage much of the
separation by hand.

sensatejournal.com/2012/04/ernst-karel-materials-recovery-facility/

Swiss Mountain Transport Systems

Ernst Karel
2011, audio, 77:50
Swiss Mountain Transport Systems is an audio CD that consists of location recordings made
during the summer and fall of 2008 of the various transport systems which are specific to
mountainous terrain – gondolas (aerial cable cars), funiculars, and chairlifts – of different types,
of different vintages, and accessing different elevations, in different parts of Switzerland. In this
way the album is a sonic investigation of the integration of such technology into the Swiss social-
geographical landscape. Recorded from within mostly enclosed mobile environments, this
emergent music includes quasi-harmonic mechanical drones, intermittent percussiveness, and
transient acoustic glimpses of a vast surrounding landscape inhabited by humans and other
animals.

www.gruenrekorder.de

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On Broadway
Aryo Danusiri
2011, HDV, 62 min.
A structural account of the cultural transformation of a mosque in a basement space in Manhattan,
New York City. As suggested by the title, this film is 'a song' of transformational moments of space,
identities and belief. Consisting of six long take shots, it starts with a relaxed conversation in the
everyday life of an emptiness of a basement. Then it gradually becomes an event - an event of
struggle. At the end, with a twist, it raises questions about the boundaries between the mundane
and the spiritual, the politics and the everyday.

www.ragam.org

Foreign Parts
Véréna Paravel and JP Sniadecki
2010, HD video, 81 min.
A hidden enclave in the shadow of the New York Mets' new stadium, the neighborhood of Willets
Point is an industrial zone fated for demolition. Filled with scrapyards and auto salvage shops,
lacking sidewalks or sewage lines, the area seems ripe for urban development. But Foreign
Parts discovers a strange community where wrecks, refuse and recycling form a thriving commerce.
Cars are stripped, sorted and cataloged by brand and part, then resold to an endless parade of
drive-thru customers. Joe, the last original resident, rages and rallies through the street like a lost
King Lear, trying to contest his imminent eviction. Two lovers, Sara and Luis, struggle for food and
safety through the winter while living in an abandoned van. Julia, the homeless queen of the
junkyard, exalts in her beatific visions of daily life among the forgotten. The film observes and
captures the struggle of a contestes "eminent domain" neighborhood before its disappearance
under the capitalization of New York's urban ecology.

www.foreignpartsfilm.com

Heard Laboratories
Ernst Karel
2010, audio, 79:00
A sonic ethnography of scientific research environments at Harvard University. The sounds of
equipment, devices, and activities draw attention to the physical processes underlying scientific
research, the work underway which provides a ground for our highly technologized society. In the
name of human progress, enormous resources are devoted to and consumed by such activities,
which are both hidden and taken for granted. Heard Laboratories brings this background to the fore.

www.and-oar.org

72 Hours
John Hulsey
2010
An ongoing series of site-specific interventions that combines video projection with direct action to
address the lived experience of foreclosure.

www.jhulsey.net

Hell Roaring Creek

Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2010, audio-video, 35mm and HD digital video,
20 mins.
An auroral pastoral.

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The High Trail

Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2010, audio-video,
7 mins.
In the monumental American West, we are acoustic eavesdroppers on a man
petting his herding dog, while we are visual witnesses to the progress of their charges, as
apparently infinite as Rabelais' "moutons de Panurge," across a mythic landscape.

The Quick and the Dead / Moutons de Panurge

Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Four channel video installation
Berlinale Forum, loop. 2010
A commission by the Kino Arsenal to commemorate the four decades of the
Berlin International Film Festival Forum.

Trees Tropiques
Alex Fattal
2010
Trees Tropiques subtly explores the difficult issues that arise when the ethics of deforestation and
the ethnographic encounter intersect. The vilm incisively poses the question: "Who has the right to
cut... both trees and film footage?" Seemingly an observational ethnographic immersion in life along
the waterways where the sweet water of the Amazon basin mixes with the salty Atlantic Ocean, the
film is suddenly interrupted by questions about the ethics of including images of deforestation,
which could land the protagonist in trouble with Brazil's environmental police.

The Yellow Bank

JP Sniadecki
2010
Watching, waiting, and traversing: a portrait of Shanghai at the confluence of tempestuous
weather, looming architecture, and murky waterways during a total solar eclipse.

More Information

As Long As There's Breath

Stephanie Spray
2009, HD video, 55 min.

As Long as There’s Breath depicts a Nepali family’s struggles for cohesion despite everyday
travails and the absence of a beloved son.

More Information

Sweetgrass
Ilisa Barbash
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
2009, 35mm, 101 min.
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, “Sweetgrass” follows the last modern-day cowboys
to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-
Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a
world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately
meshed.

www.sweetgrassthemovie.com

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Terrace of the Sea

Diana Allan
2009
Terrace of the Sea (Jal el Bahar) was shot in 2008 in an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin gathering
established in 1948 on a stretch of beach north of Tyre, in south Lebanon. Structured around a
collection of family photographs taken over three generations, the vilm engages with the historical
experience of this community by focusing on their precarious relationship with the environment, and
in particular on the role that the sea plays in their lives.

Terrace of the Sea examines the experiences of the Ibrahim family – not simply through the prism of
nationalist politics, but also through their relationship to work and to the physical environment. More
broadly, it is a meditation on the process of memory and on the distances between photography and
film, land and sea and – between seeing and being seen.

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7 Queens
Véréna Paravel
2009, 22 min.
Recorded during an aimless extended (anti)-ethnographic walk beneath the elevated tracks of the
#7 subway line in NYC, 7 Queens wanders in the fragile zone of fleeting relations. Through a
series of spontaneous interactions, this piece experiment with boundaries and physical thresholds,
and captures evanescent forms of intimacy through random, and sometimes aborted encounters.

Chaiqian (Demolition)
J P Sniadecki
2008, video, 62 min.
A portrait of migrant labor, urban space, and ephemeral relationships in the center of Chengdu,
the capital of Sichuan province in western China.

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Monsoon-Reflections
Stephanie Spray
2008, video, 22 min.
Drawing its title from a poem by Lekhnath Paudyal, who depicts the monsoon season as sublime
and blissful, this video focuses instead on the melancholy and grit of two female Nepali field
hands as they carry out their monsoon routines in Lekhnath, Nepal. The video is a sensorial
riposte to Paudyal's idealistic depiction of the monsoon as "joyous from start to finish," by means
of reflection on labor, gender, and fleeting pleasures in rural Nepal.

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Kale and Kale

Stephanie Spray
2007, video, 50 min.
Kale and Kale is an observational work that explores the subtle everyday interactions and
relationships among an uncle and nephew, both nicknamed “Kale,” or “black one,” and their families
in rural Nepal. The roles they play in the village, with their families, and outside of the village are
gradually revealed by way of discrete vignettes. Through the pacing of the scenes and the length of
shots, this ethnographic video is also a depiction of time and its passing in rural Nepal. The work
invites the viewer to engage unhurriedly and sensorially with its subjects and their environment.

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Luchando
Noelle Stout
2007, video, 67 min.
Luchando follows a day in the life of four Cuban hustlers—a travesti, a lesbiana, and two pingueros—
who set out to resolve their touching and at-times humorous predicaments in Havana’s gay
underground. Luchando takes place in the last days of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, a late-socialist nation
schizophrenically torn between the ideals of socialist equality and a rapidly growing division between
the rich and poor. The film’s title 'luchando' has historically meant the fight for Cuba’s socialist
revolution, but has become a slang term that hustlers use to describe their sexual encounters with
clients. Shot in verite style over the course of a year, Luchando refuses sensationalism and instead
emphasizes the subjective and experiential qualities of everyday life. The film explores the ambiguity

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of cultural categories such as 'homosexual' and 'hustler' that are continually renegotiated by the film’s
subjects. Through a long-term, intimate engagement with the characters Luchando humanizes the
sex trade in Havana by presenting characters who are at once vulnerable and in-control, affectionate
and opportunistic, and whose ultimate strength comes from the bonds they share with one another.

Songhua
JP Sniadecki
2007, video, 28 min.
Songhua depicts the intimate and complex relationship between Harbin residents and their “mother
river," the Songhua in northeastern China. By attending to the everyday activities of leisure and
labor unfolding along the banks and promenade, this nonfiction video also explores the interface
between aesthetics and ethnography as it addresses environmental crisis within a major waterway
of China.

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Still Life
Diana Keown Allan
2007, video, 25 min.
Still Life examines the role that a series of personal photos that survived the 1948 displacement
play in the life of Said, an elderly Palestinian from Acre now living in exile in Lebanon. The
importance of preserving these intimate remnants of a history now largely invisible within a larger
global frame of reference cannot be underestimated as Palestine as a historical signifier is in
danger of losing it’s signified. Palestine as it was before 1948 has ceased to exist; Acre is no longer
a Palestinian port and the other histories of this city now circulate as highly personal, scattered
memories. The photographs, around which this piece is structured, are not simply souvenirs or
representations, but for their owner function as imprints of Palestine that still carry material traces of
places and people from the past within them. For Said, they have become objects of affective
transference, evoking memories that remain crucial to his present sense of self––sacred objects
that record another history of relation and belonging. Still Life is the first segment of a video triptych
that explores the different ways in which memory is being mediated among Palestinians in
Lebanon.

More Information
www.nakba-archive.org

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