This recently came to our attention:
The community is invited to Sabaidee Cornell: Festival of Films from Laos, which will take place on March 1-3 on campus in conjunction with Overgrowth/Afterlife: The 26th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference. The Festival will comprise screenings of short and feature films, a talk by Misouda Heuangsoukkhoun, a Lao filmmaker, producer, and art curator, and a presentation on the history of cinema in Laos by scholar Anna Koscheeva. They look forward to seeing you!
Scheduled films include My Art Diary: Tcheu Siong; Underlying; Mattie Do’s Long Walk; Fly, Sandy, Fly; The Blanket; Pencil Box; and A Year After.
The 26th SEAP Graduate Student Conference looks to the afterlives of sites, organisms, and rubble. Turning neither to fatalism nor triumphalism in the Capitalocene, they look instead to Southeast Asians who have repurposed spaces, ecologies, appetites, and objects. They seek out what thrives in the cracks. How have humans and other species made use of the detritus of colonial and postcolonial endeavors? How are Southeast Asians foraging and outliving a century of mass extinction? How have traditions of art, dance, gustation, and literature metabolized the projects that seek to harness them? And what queer slangs, yesteryear yearnings, and fungal footholds find purchase in the rubble? They explore these material overgrowths in art and architecture; as well as in the digital and social spheres. They look both to martyrs and survivors. They welcome the intrusive, the unruly, the wicked.
They invited abstracts which grapple with the promise of national projects and the local and floral animi which outgrow them. They acknowledged Southeast Asians who subvert extinction in disturbed landscapes, as well as those involved in the ongoing revolts of the Third World against the first.
They have considered an omnivorous panel of submissions: from the humanities and arts, from the life sciences, as well as from social disciplines and professional studies. Works of poetry, prose, performance, visual art, music, and short film were invited to apply.
The 26th SEAP Graduate Student Conference will be held in a hybrid format on March 1-3, 2024 at Cornell University’s George McT. Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia in Ithaca, New York and on Zoom.