The Twelfth Annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival SSMF 2024
Practices of Resurrection and Necromancy April 19-20, 2024 The Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA) invites you to the 2024 Screening Scholarship Media Festival on the theme Practices of Resurrection and Necromancy. Join us for one day of in-person programming on works in progress! video! audio! exhibition! installation! performance!
The festival will take place in person on April 20th at the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, with an opening event on Friday evening, April 19th.
We look forward to hosting a vibrant festival that holds together over 40 projects and events and conversations to match. There will be film screenings, panel and roundtable presentations and discussions, performances, installations, exhibitions, and artists talks; play, dancing, snacks, old and new friends.
April 19th (6-8 pm) Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum April 20th (9 am-8 pm), Annenberg School for Communications Final program coming soon to www.camrapenn.org!
Attendance is free and open to the public - registration is required
About Practices of Resurrection and Necromancy
In loss, there is transformation. Despite the thought that endings entail an absolute departure from “potentiality”, it is in endings, in losses, that we find some of the most obscured parts of ourselves. Death, an ever lingering loss, brings us to important divinations around what it was to be our tender selves. What we find in tenderness absent, are transformational sites in need of necromancy. And when conjuring may not be potent enough to harness certain chances at transformation, the dream of resurrection emerges to reanimate flesh in a bid to restart narratives. These narratives and knowledge are what bring us to spaces between the known and unknowns of history.
In resurgences from death, loss, absence, practices of resurrection and necromancy are vital wisdoms.We retrieve selves taken by death, both social and physiological, and germinate new worlds in loss. Our thinking about resurrection and necromancy brings us back to a place of tender transformation. Grief becomes potential in collectivity. Death a new introduction. It is in the processes of resurrection and necromancy that we cultivate our futures. These futures are ones of refusal. The refusal to pursue the recognition of dominating colonial powers. The refusal to be known in partial. The refusal to stay dead by the hands of those who brought dispossession and alienation.This future, between necromancy and resurrection, is anti-colonial.What we raise stands to liberate us through a healing of rebirth and a communing with those we refuse to forget.
Our memories, and re-memories, suture wounds past in a bid to let bloom rich futures where both those passed and those arriving are given themselves in their stormy wholes. What we find in futures brought by resurrection and necromancy, is an active imagining. Our active imagining refuses to fall victim to the haunting thoughts of a half-hearted return; instead, what we imagine through a reanimation of flesh, knowledge systems, and self, is a future where the “all” of us is celebrated.In our loss, we have rebelled against permanent death. Our future is the union of the living and the reanimated. We have risen, hungry, for the (re)birth, the (un)death of a tender world.
