Sensory Ethnography, Part 2

Abstract

This follow-up to “Sensory Ethnography, Part 1” (published by Oxford in Avant-Doc, 2015) is a set of interviews with veterans of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. J. P. Sniadecki, Stephanie Spray, and Véréna Paravel discuss their experiences with the SEL and director Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Sniadecki and Spray discuss their early films, made in China and Nepal respectively; and Sniadecki discusses his more recent work. “Sensory Ethnography, Part 2” concludes with discussions with Sniadecki and Paravel on their Foreign Parts (2010), about an automobile junkyard in Queens, New York; with Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn on People’s Park (2012), a single-shot excursion through a popular public park in Chengdu, China; and with Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta on El Mar La Mar (2017), a visual evocation of the border territory between Sonora and Arizona.