Presented in collaboration with Penn's Department of Cinema & Media Studies and Public Trust
Join us for a listening and screening event featuring the work of anthropologist, sound artist, and filmmaker Gustavo Valdivia-Corrales. His extended ethnographic fieldwork with indigenous alpaca herders and climate scientists, together with sound recordings and footage from the Quelccaya Ice Cap in the high Andes of Peru, traces worlds set adrift by retreating ice.
Following the screenings, anthropologist Kristina Lyons will join Valdivia for a conversation on the filmic and sonic practices of ethnographic fieldwork.
Gustavo Valdivia-Corrales is an anthropologist, sound artist, and filmmaker whose practice is rooted in the Quelccaya, the largest tropical ice cap in the world. Through long-term fieldwork with indigenous alpaca herders, collaboration with scientists, and close listening to the glacier’s sounds, he traces the shifting ways retreating ice remakes human and more-than-human worlds. He is currently developing The Ice is Near, the Solitude is Immense, a full-length experimental documentary about the fragile encounter between the rhythms of a changing climate and everyday life in the high Andes of Peru.
Kristina Lyons’ current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, feminist science studies, and legal anthropology in Latin America. Her manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke 2020), moves across laboratories, greenhouses, forests, and farms in the capital city of Bogotá, Colombia and the Andean-Amazonian department of Putumayo. It weaves together an intimate ethnography of two kinds of practitioners – state soil scientists and peasant farmers – who attempt to cultivate alternatives to commercial coca crops and the military-led, growth-oriented development paradigms intended to substitute them. In 2015, Dr. Lyons directed a popular education documentary film project based on farmer-to-farmer alternative agricultural practices called Cultivating a Bien Vivir (Living Well) in the Amazon. Her current work focuses on the memory and mourning of water, hydrogeologic processes, fluvial violence, participatory forms of territorial planning, socionatural disaster, and water-inspired relationalities and subjectivities.
Janneane Blevins is a media scholar and PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in cities, sound, and the environment. Her current research examines the political ecology of climate infrastructure, considering state power, community activism, urban planning, and the resonances of life in public spaces. Her work is informed by sound studies, critical geography, anthropology, and environmental media, and she uses soundwalks and other sonic and visual methods to shift between practice, theory, and action.
