Date: rescheduled to Thursday, May 5
Rain Date: TBA
Time: 4 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Cost: Free
Location: South side of UMBC campus. See this link for a map to Free parking in the Stadium Lot. For more campus maps and directions, see this LINK.

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Creative Acts: Site Specific Dance & Music in Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park - Act One

Thirty Oaks

Director & Choreographer: Meghan Flanigan
Composer & Musician: Timothy Nohe
Dancers: Kate Brundrett, Ravae Duhaney, Josephine N. Kalema, Emily Kimak, Franki Trout
Musicians: Rose Hammer Burt, Tiffany DeFoe, John Dierker, Will Redman
Sculptural Costumes: Antoinette Suiter

The first part of the presentation will showcase Thirty Oaks, a site-specific work that celebrates the Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park with dance, music and visuals. This project will join choreographer Meghan Flanigan, sound artist Timothy Nohe, and visual artist Antoinette Suiter in a multidisciplinary collaboration involving UMBC dance students and Baltimore musicians. The piece reflects on the juxtaposition of the natural and built environment, seeking inspiration equally from both the beauty of the trees and their rigid linear planting. The work sets a dialogue between the human instinct to preserve and enjoy nature while also transforming and polluting it. The audience will be invited to inhabit the park with the performers, enjoying the setting as well as the performance, and will be given the opportunity to contribute to the collective journal kept at the park.

This portion of the event is supported by the TKF Foundation.

Creative Acts: Site Specific Dance & Music in Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park - Act Two

Songs from a Public Diary

Composers: Shane Parks and Charles Miller
Vocalist: Madeline Waters
Keyboard: Charles Miller

Song 1: Dear Lover
Song 2: I Wish he Could See
Song 3: A Day in the Journal

(additional songs to be announced)

The second part of the presentation includes musical settings of texts taken from the public journal in the park. For years students, faculty, staff, and visitors have written in the journal at the site. Their entries range from letters of appreciation for the beautiful space and its peaceful atmosphere to college trials and tribulations. Often students write about stressful semesters or especially joyful relationships. Anyone passing the park can read the ever-changing book and add to it themselves.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EVENT AND ITS PARTICIPANTS

Free Hour Films, Wednesdays, 12:00 – 1 p.m.
CADVC gallery theatre, 1st Floor Fine Arts

An experimental partnership between Maryland Traditions statewide folklife program, CADVC and the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community and Culture to bring you memorable short documentary films followed by a discussion with an insider--a filmmaker or practitioner--or both.

This spring we offer you Baltimore Films/Baltimore People and a glimpse of three local legends.

Globe Posters' fluorescent ads for R&B bands and local events have been a part of street life for 80 years. At one time, it seemed that every telephone pole and tree sported a Globe poster. Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, "King" Solomon Burke were all customers. Share a glimpse of a Baltimore tradition's last days and new beginnings. A post-screening discussion will be led by Bob Cicero, President of Globe Poster Printing; John Lewis, filmmaker and Arts Editor of Baltimore magazine; and Rei Spinnicchio, filmmaker.

This event is sponsored in part by the Department of American Studies; the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, Maryland Traditions, the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community and Culture; and the Maryland State Arts Council.

12 pm, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (located on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building). Admission is free. For more information call 410-455-3188.

CADVC
Thurs. April 21, 4 p.m.
Curator's Lecture: Migrants Everywhere
FREE event

In this lecture, Where Do We Migrate To? curator Niels Van Tomme will reflect upon heightened notions of migration and exile. Calling for an increasingly complex understanding of the contemporary migrant condition, Van Tomme will explore displacement as a generalized condition.

Niels Van Tomme is a NY-based curator, researcher, and critic who serves as the Director of Arts and Media at Provisions Learning Project in Washington, DC. His independently curated exhibitions have been shown internationally.

Free Hour Films, Wednesdays, 12:00 – 1 p.m.
CADVC gallery theatre, 1st Floor Fine Arts

An experimental partnership between Maryland Traditions statewide folklife program, CADVC and the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community and Culture to bring you memorable short documentary films followed by a discussion with an insider--a filmmaker or practitioner--or both.

This spring we offer you Baltimore Films/Baltimore People and a glimpse of three local legends.

Love it or hate it, Formstone is here to stay. Who would guess that synthetic stone found on rowhouses throughout Baltimore was invented here in 1939 and took the city by storm. Beloved and reviled, the faux stone is another one of our trademarks that is likely here to stay. Learn all there is to know from the people who made it, sold it and lived in it, including another local icon, John Waters. A post-screening discussion will be led by filmmakers Skizz Cyzyk and Lillian Bowers, and Formstone salesman Fred Schreufer.

This event is sponsored in part by the Department of American Studies; the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, Maryland Traditions, the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community and Culture; and the Maryland State Arts Council.

12 pm, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (located on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building). Admission is free. For more information call 410-455-3188.

Free Hour Films, Wednesdays, Noon – 1 p.m.
CADVC gallery theatre, 1st Floor Fine Arts

An experimental partnership between Maryland Traditions statewide folklife program, CADVC and the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community and Culture to bring you memorable short documentary films followed by a discussion with an insider--a filmmaker or practitioner--or both.

This spring we offer you Baltimore Films/Baltimore People and a glimpse of three local legends.

April 13 - The Screen Painters - 28 mins.

Meet the men and women of Baltimore’s ethnic neighborhoods who carry on a century-old folk art and maintain an unusual source of privacy once synonymous with city living. Johnny Eck, internationally revered “freak” is among the artists.

Comments: Elaine Eff, Film Director & UMBC Folklorist-in-Residence and Richard Chisolm, Cinematographer, UMBC ‘82

April 20 - Little Castles: A Formstone Phenomenon

Love it or hate it, Formstone is here to stay. Who would guess that synthetic stone found on rowhouses throughout Baltimore was invented here in 1939 and took the city by storm. Beloved and reviled, the faux stone is another one of our trademarks that is likely here to stay. Learn all there is to know from the people who made it, sold it and lived in it, including another local icon, John Waters. A post-screening discussion will be led by filmmaker Lillian Bowers, and Formstone salesman Fred Schreufer.

April 27 - Say It Loud!

Globe Posters' fluorescent ads for R&B bands and local events have been a part of street life for 80 years. At one time, it seemed that every telephone pole and tree sported a Globe poster. Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, "King" Solomon Burke were all customers. Share a glimpse of a Baltimore tradition's last days and new beginnings. A post-screening discussion will be led by Bob Cicero, President of Globe Poster Printing; John Lewis, filmmaker and Arts Editor of Baltimore magazine; and Rei Spinnicchio, filmmaker.

These events are sponsored in part by the Department of American Studies; the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, Maryland Traditions, the Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community and Culture; and the Maryland State Arts Council.

12 pm, Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (located on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building). Admission is free. For more information call 410-455-3188.

Closing Program: Let Each One Go Where He May
Date: Saturday, April 30, 2011
Time: 6:00 p.m.

Location: Johns Hopkins University, TBA
DIRECTIONS & MAP
Cost: Free

Let Each One Go Where He May
Ben Russell
2009, 16mm, 135 minutes, United States

Let Each One Go Where He May is the debut feature of Chicago-based artist Ben Russell. A portrait of two Saramaccaner Maroon brothers, the film captures their journey from the outskirts of Paramaribo, Suriname across different rural landscapes, as they trace the route their ancestors had undertaken 300 years earlier as slaves, escaping their Dutch masters. Employing a carefully choreographed formal visual language (masterfully comprised of 13 ten-minute-long single shots), the work questions our understanding of the historical, political, and personal meanings of this trajectory, while implicitly addressing issues of ethnographic, documentary, and (self-)representation.

Click here for more information about the film series

Program 5: Waiting for Happiness (Heremanoko)
Date: Thursday, April 28, 2011
Time: 6:00 p.m.

Location: UMBC, Lecture Hall 3
DIRECTIONS & CAMPUS MAP
Cost: Free

Waiting for Happiness (Heremanoko)
Abderrahmane Sissako
2002, DVD, 90 minutes, Mauritania/Mali

Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako described his film as “a portrait of people in departure, who have to a certain extent already left, without having actually yet moved.” Engaging with the transitory state inherent to trajectories of exile, the narrative of the film centers on Abdallah, a young man who awaits his departure to Europe in Nouadhibou, on the Coast of Mauritania. Beyond the central character, the port city itself comes to embody a state of suspension, as existential and geographical in-betweenness is invoked through spare dialogue and striking cinematography.

Click here for more information about the film series

Program 4: Migrant and Diasporic Histories II
Date: Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Time: 6:00 p.m.

Location: Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC
DIRECTIONS & CAMPUS MAP
Cost: Free

Capsular
Herman Asselberghs
2006, DVD, 23 minutes, Belgium

This video, by Belgian artist Herman Asselberghs, investigates the divide between Europe and Africa, North and South, “inside” and “outside,” through the particular site of Ceuta, an autonomous Spanish enclave nestled on the North African side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Investigating the geopolitical, as well as the philosophical implications of having a fenced off enclave of the European Union situated on the African continent, the work considers ways in which this isolated space negotiates necessary African involvement in Europe’s questionable immigration policies, and the implications of outsourcing the border of Europe, both physically and symbolically, to a different continent.

Eurolines Catering or Homesick Cuisine
Pavel Braila
2006, DVD, 17 minutes, Moldovia/Germany

Playfully uncovering the connections between food and homesickness as central to the migratory experience, this engaging piece presents the trajectory of a bag of home-cooked Moldavian dishes prepared by the artist’s family across Europe, from Braila’s hometown in Moldavia to a Berlin art gallery opening. Employing the low-budget bus line Eurolines for sending the food, the package traces the itinerary of many Eastern European immigrants going west in order to find work.

My America
Egle Rakauskaite
2003, DVD, 12 minutes, Lithuania

Traveling to America to visit her relatives, the artist takes up a job often assigned to newly arrived immigrants: taking care of the elderly and the physically or mentally challenged. The video shows her carefully fulfilling different aspects of her job, while different soundscapes and a voiceover provide an impressionistic evocation of her experiences in America as an immigrant. Through different levels of representation, the piece comments in diverging ways on those left out or left behind in popular and mainstream depictions of America as a migrant’s destination.

Crossing Over
Tanja Ostojic
2001, DVD, 7 minutes, Serbia/Germany

In 2000, artist Tanja Ostojic started the “Looking for a Husband with EU Passport” project. Publishing an ad with this title, she exchanged over 500 letters with numerous applicants. Following correspondence with a German man for over six months, their first meeting was arranged and recorded as a public performance in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 2001. The video documents this meeting, with subtitles providing a subjective framing for the event. In her work, Ostojic uses her own identity and body to forcefully comment on immigration policies, bypassing the abstract notion of “the migrant” to evoke a personal, individualized and gendered experience.

Green Dolphin
Oliver Husain
2008, DVD, 15 minutes, Canada

In Green Dolphin, German-Indian artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain constructs a hybrid narrative in which reality and dream worlds converge, constructing seemingly coherent spatiotemporal unity between disparate locales, from Kuala Lumpur to Toronto. Inspired by the 1947 film Green Dolphin which starred Lana Turner, this playful short piece presents a Filipino Canadian dancer as she relates her intricate love affairs to us, her character mediating between different diasporic universes.

eight to four
Usha Seejarim
2001, DVD, 8 minutes, South Africa

Usha Seejarim, a South African artist of Indian heritage, investigates the multiplicity of histories and questions of memory at work in specific, everyday geographies of South Africa. In this work, she presents visual recordings of the roads of the country, which were formed as a result of forced migration. eight to four captures the shadows of vehicles passing along highway M1 South, a route connecting Johannesburg to Lenasia, a township which was specifically demarcated for South Africa’s Indian population during apartheid.

Encore (Paradise Omeros: Redux)
Issac Julien
2003, DVD, 5 minutes, UK

This short film, a reworking of Julien’s earlier multi-channel video piece Paradise Omeros (2002) follows Nobel Prize winning Caribbean poet Derek Walcott to Santa Lucia, a place of origin for Julien as well, as his parents migrated from the island to England in the 1960s. The film, inspired by Walcott’s epic poem Omeros (1990), evokes experiences of displacement and alienation, as striking, luscious, color-saturated imagery and Walcott’s voice-over associated with the homeland are staged against London’s drab, industrial wasteland.

Click here for more information about the film series

Where Do We Migrate To? Film Series
Program 3: From the Other Side
Date: Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Time: 4:30 p.m.

Location: UMBC, Lecture Hall 7
DIRECTIONS & CAMPUS MAP
Cost: Free

From the Other Side
Chantal Akerman
2001, DVD, 99 minutes, Belgium/France

In From the Other Side, Chantal Akerman looks at the harsh environment of the US Mexican border, where cutting edge technologies of surveillance have been systematically employed to limit illegal northbound passage to America. Shifting her lens between the border towns of Agua Prieta in Sonora, where people from across Mexico pass their time before attempting to cross into America, and the neighboring Douglas, Arizona, surrounded by mountains and desert flatlands, Akerman depicts the personal as well as the political implications of illegal immigration.

Click here for more information about the film series