Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) 2025
CAMRA is pleased to announce the theme of the annual 2025 Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF): Sound & Color.
This year, we will be unhinging from indexical representations and reorienting towards what is possible when we attune ourselves through the senses: music and sound, color and light, touch and taste. It is a call to inhabit the modality in multimodality and to embrace abstraction as we listen, learn, teach, exchange, and prototype freer conditions in the long story of life on earth. CAMRA invites a chorus of artists and writers including Sonia Sanchez, Immanuel Wilkins, Huda Asfour, Farah Barqawi, among others, who recall Christina Sharpe’s provocation that “spectacle is not repair” by attending to feeling through creative practice in research.
The festival will take place during April 2025, and will involve commissioned musical and poetry performance. We will open with an invitation into the sonic world of the oud layered with speech acts attesting to the sheer force, vitality and poetics of Palestinian life. Fragmented Return is a performance from Huda Asfour and Farah Al-Barqawi two Gazan women who live into the fullness of their experience as they witness the besiegement of their lands, accounting for and making meaning still, and in spite of it.
Opening Night Performance and Talk: Fragmented Return
Friday April 11, 6:00pm-8:00pm | Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum
When Huda (b. 1982) and Farah (b. 1985) first met in Gaza in 1997, neither could have anticipated that their brief musical performance at the Latin Patriarchate School, also known as Deir al-Latine, would become the catalyst for a lifelong journey. Fragmented Return is a multimedia performance by Palestinian artists Huda Asfour and Farah Barqawi, blending elements of their experiences with exile and attempts at return. Through words, music, and visuals, they weave a shared narrative of lives shaped by occupation, displacement, and borders, as well as by joy, resistance, and a quest for collective liberation. Their intertwined experiences across cities such as Gaza, Cairo, and more recently Brooklyn, bring to the stage a retelling of their version of Palestinian diaspora and the constant struggle of belonging, all viewed through a critical political lens, delivered with humor and raw emotions.
Keynote Performance and Conversation: Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood Jazz Ensemble featuring Sonia Sanchez followed by conversation with Imani Perry
Wednesday April 23, 6:00pm-8:00pm | Harrison Auditorium, Penn Museum
This performance and conversation will be an offering in color, sound and transmuting the of violence state and carceral systems in ways that Black people have always embodied through relationship to community, self and spirit. The conversation follows a performance of the jazz ensemble Blues Blood, reflecting the modality of place and home, with Sonia Sanchez and Immanuel Wilkins sharing roots, inheritances and formational experiences in Philadelphia.
Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood, is a meditative offering partially inspired by his childhood in the Philadelphia area. Co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello, and featuring vocalists Ganavya, June McDoom, Yaw Agyeman and Cécile McLorin Salvant, it’s Wilkins’ it is both an album and a multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us. As Christina Sharpe has written in the liner notes for the project, “The body and its references and influences are central to Wilkins collaborations and his gathering, innovating, improvising, and extending. He is playing us into a future, bringing the past along but sounding it differently.” For Brent Hayes Edwards,“The profound achievement of Blues Blood is like a translation of the theorist Stuart Hall’s influential proposition that “race is the modality in which class is lived.” Wilkins has given us a suite that says the same thing in a different tongue. Blue is the modality in which black is lived.”
This year, we will be unhinging from indexical representations and reorienting towards what is possible when we attune ourselves through the senses: music and sound, color and light, touch and taste. It is a call to inhabit the modality in multimodality and to embrace abstraction as we listen, learn, teach, exchange, and prototype freer conditions in the long story of life on earth. CAMRA invites a chorus of artists and writers including Sonia Sanchez, Immanuel Wilkins, Huda Asfour, Farah Barqawi, among others, who recall Christina Sharpe’s provocation that “spectacle is not repair” by attending to feeling through creative practice in research.
The festival will take place during April 2025, and will involve commissioned musical and poetry performance. We will open with an invitation into the sonic world of the oud layered with speech acts attesting to the sheer force, vitality and poetics of Palestinian life. Fragmented Return is a performance from Huda Asfour and Farah Al-Barqawi two Gazan women who live into the fullness of their experience as they witness the besiegement of their lands, accounting for and making meaning still, and in spite of it.
Opening Night Performance and Talk: Fragmented Return
Friday April 11, 6:00pm-8:00pm | Rainey Auditorium, Penn Museum
When Huda (b. 1982) and Farah (b. 1985) first met in Gaza in 1997, neither could have anticipated that their brief musical performance at the Latin Patriarchate School, also known as Deir al-Latine, would become the catalyst for a lifelong journey. Fragmented Return is a multimedia performance by Palestinian artists Huda Asfour and Farah Barqawi, blending elements of their experiences with exile and attempts at return. Through words, music, and visuals, they weave a shared narrative of lives shaped by occupation, displacement, and borders, as well as by joy, resistance, and a quest for collective liberation. Their intertwined experiences across cities such as Gaza, Cairo, and more recently Brooklyn, bring to the stage a retelling of their version of Palestinian diaspora and the constant struggle of belonging, all viewed through a critical political lens, delivered with humor and raw emotions.
Keynote Performance and Conversation: Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood Jazz Ensemble featuring Sonia Sanchez followed by conversation with Imani Perry
Wednesday April 23, 6:00pm-8:00pm | Harrison Auditorium, Penn Museum
This performance and conversation will be an offering in color, sound and transmuting the of violence state and carceral systems in ways that Black people have always embodied through relationship to community, self and spirit. The conversation follows a performance of the jazz ensemble Blues Blood, reflecting the modality of place and home, with Sonia Sanchez and Immanuel Wilkins sharing roots, inheritances and formational experiences in Philadelphia.
Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood, is a meditative offering partially inspired by his childhood in the Philadelphia area. Co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello, and featuring vocalists Ganavya, June McDoom, Yaw Agyeman and Cécile McLorin Salvant, it’s Wilkins’ it is both an album and a multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us. As Christina Sharpe has written in the liner notes for the project, “The body and its references and influences are central to Wilkins collaborations and his gathering, innovating, improvising, and extending. He is playing us into a future, bringing the past along but sounding it differently.” For Brent Hayes Edwards,“The profound achievement of Blues Blood is like a translation of the theorist Stuart Hall’s influential proposition that “race is the modality in which class is lived.” Wilkins has given us a suite that says the same thing in a different tongue. Blue is the modality in which black is lived.”