OSU Events

Movable Memories

By Randall Rowe, PhD Student, Department of Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Cultures

 On Monday, March 19th the Global Mobility Project hosted two exciting events with South Korean artist Do-Ho Suh. There was a great turnout for his talk at the Knowlton School of Architecture, where he elaborated on his creative process. His work questions the concept of home and how a person transports home across time and space. Do-Ho has created fabric homes by measuring the dimensions of his former living spaces and then sewing together representations of these spaces. He has also engaged with his former homes in other ways. For example, he has used a technique called rubbing to create traced representations of these spaces. He wraps the subjects of his installments (his former homes) in white paper and carefully rubs the surfaces with a pencil to reveal the intricate designs and details of the living spaces. This very delicate and physical practice (measuring, sewing, rubbing, etc.) reinforces Do-Ho’s deep connection to the spaces. Consequently his memory of home becomes a portable manifestation of an abstract concept that may be carried with him in a suitcase everywhere he goes.

Do-Ho talked about how his fabric structures are developed from the memories of his former dwellings. They change meaning as they grow to include the various places he encounters in his work and life, he says. His presentation started with his original installation, Seoul Home, which debuted in Los Angeles at the L.A. Korean Culture Center (1991). His installation grew to incorporate his other former homes and began to move from exhibit space to exhibit space. Reflecting the transient nature of his work and the migration experience, Do-Ho’s Seoul Home became Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home… (1999).

Later in the day, we hosted a screening at the Wexner Center for the Arts of Fallen Star: Finding Home (2016), a film that was directed by our very own Prof. Vera Brunner-Sung and Valerie Stadler. This film documents the Fallen Star art installation (2012), which was a collaboration led by Do-Ho Suh at the Stuart Collection of the University California, San Diego. Fallen Star was an ambitious project that culminated in placing a small house, inspired by a cottage on the East coast of the U.S., on the 7th floor roof of a building in Southern California. Again, Do-Ho engages with the idea of home, but this time on a college campus where many arrive from other cities, states and countries. After the film, the audience was treated to a rare opportunity to ask questions of both the creator of the project and one of the directors of the films.

In our Q & A session, both Do-Ho and Prof. Brunner-Sung stressed the collaborative nature of their work. Fallen Star was made possible by the expertise of many people in a variety of fields. Do-Ho Suh envisioned the project, but conceded that he, alone was unable to execute such a large scale work. The Stuart Collection, together with local engineers and contractors constructed and raised the house, and the process was documented by Brunner-Sung and Stadler. The film not only shows the process of erecting the project, but also captures the process of change within those who helped carry out the project. A project of this scale was dismissed as too frivolous or nonsensical by skeptical observers, but the team stood by the mission. During a poignant moment in the film, the superintendent of the job, Don Franken, concludes that perhaps art can be difficult to understand because it is experienced by every person in a different way. This captures the transformative nature of Fallen Star and Do-Ho’s work in general. Those who view his art are invited to question otherwise stable and personal concepts such as home or belonging. Do-Ho’s work is particularly powerful, because it delicately reminds the viewer that one’s home is not always constant. In fact, it is often ever-changing, and every person uniquely relates to an idea of home.

Thank you to Do-Ho Suh for visiting us at The Ohio State University, and thank you to all who helped make both events happen. Thank you especially to our co-sponsors: Office of International Affairs, Asian American Studies, Ohio State University, OSU Department of Art, Knowlton School of Architecture, and the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering!

Musician Visit with Ezé Wendtoin

Ezé Wendtoin, a prominent West African musician will visit OSU Campus March 19-27. He has dedicated his work as a musician to increase understanding of different cultures in Germany. As a solo artist and together with the Dresden musician collective “Banda Internationale” he has stood against racism and xenophobia through music in concerts, theater, social projects, and in his work as an educator and scholar of German Second Language Acquisition. At the Ohio State, he will offer concerts, conversations and lectures to engage with our local students, artists and community.

Find below the events open to the public which we encourage you to attend.

March 19:

12am: Public Lunch with graduate students, Research Commons 352, 18th Ave Library

1-2pm: Pop-Up Performances on the Oval

4-5.30pm: Lecture “Music in Foreign Language Education: Learning German through Music in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso“, Arps 388, RSVP HERE

March 20:

12.45am-2.10 pm: “Studying Abroad: Sharing Experiences”, CLLC Lunch Discussion with music with Foreign Language Students students, Hagerty Hall courtyard/ Crane Café, lunch snacks will be provided, RSVP HERE

2.30-4.30pm: “Bringing Different Worlds Together Through Music”, student workshops in German and French, SIGN UP HERE

5-6.30pm: “Being African in Trump’s America“, Roundtable Discussion and Concert, Frank Hale Cultural Center, 153 W 12th Ave, Columbus, Ohio 43210

March 21:

2-3.30pm: Lunch with graduate students, Jennings Hall 050

4-5pm: Pop-Up Performances on the Oval

March 22:

3-3.30pm: Pop-Up Performances on the Oval

3.30-5pm: Musical Discussion with the Migration Studies Working Group, Research Commons, 350A, 18th Ave Library, RSVP by emailing migrationstudiesworkinggroup@gmail.com

March 27:

6pm: “Ezé Wendtoin” Collaborative Concert at the Global Gallery Café in Clintonville

More information can be found on www.u.osu.edu/ezewendtoin OR www.go.osu.edu/eze

More information about Student Workshops in German and French:

Bringing Different Worlds Together Through Music

In this workshop, Ezé uses music invites students of German and French to develop ways to think about and bring together different understandings of culture and living. He will incorporate your perspectives to encourage a learning environment in which you are able to learn with and from each other.

Ezé will talk about his work with different non-profit organizations and collectives (Atticus e.V., Lauter Leise in Sachsen, Banda Internationale). He will also present his visits to local schools in Germany, during which he talked with students about issues of racism, prejudice, and clichés, telling the students about how he has made his way to Germany, and what role music played for his journey. He will talk about Burkina Faso by presenting different photographic materials.

The workshop is open to students of German and French.

Workshop 1 (French): 3/20, 2.45-3.30pm

Workshop 2 (German): 3/20, 3.40- 4.25pm

SIGN UP HERE

There is no minimum proficiency level required. Students of different proficiency-levels are encouraged to participate. Each workshop holds 20 students.

Event Page

Co-sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures (GLL), the Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (CLLC), the Department of African American and African Studies (AAAS), the Migration Studies Working Group, the Department of Music and the Global Mobility Project.

Plenary Panel: “Borders, Barriers, and Belonging: A Spotlight on Global Migration.”

Join us for the plenary panel that will open the Midwest Slavic Conference on Saturday, March 24, 8:30-10:30am. The plenary panel is free and open to the public.

“Borders, Barriers, and Belonging: A Spotlight on Global Migration,” will host five interdisciplinary migration scholars to engage in a discussion that weaves together regional and global perspectives in historical and contemporary human mobility.

The panelists include Jeffrey Cohen (Ohio State), Steven Lee (UC Berkeley), Eleanor Paynter (Ohio State), Johanna Sellman (Ohio State), and Sunnie Rucker-Chang (University of Cincinnati). Tara Zahra will serve as the panel discussant.

The panel is organized by the Center for Slavic and East European Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, East Asian Studies Center, and the Middle East Studies Center.

Upcoming Artist Talk and Roundtable Discussion (RSVP by Feb. 9th) with Photographer Susan Meiselas

OSU EVENT
Tuesday, February 13, 2018, 7:00pm
“Artist Talk with Photographer Susan Meiselas”
Location: Wexner Center for the Arts
OSU EVENT
Wednesday, February 14, 2018, 10:15am-12:00pm
“Roundtable Discussion with Photographer Susan Meiselas”
Location: Thompson Library Room 165
RSVP by February 6 to globalmobility@osu.edu
Event Page
OSU EVENT
Co-sponsors: Department of Art Living Culture Initiative and Visiting Artist Program, the Global Mobility Project and the Migration Studies Working Group.

OSU Event

Susan Meiselas, born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948, received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. Her first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs, whom she photographed during three consecutive summers while teaching photography in New York public schools. Carnival Strippers was originally published in 1976 and a selection was installed at the Whitney Museum of Art in June 2000.

Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and has worked as a freelance photographer since then. She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua and her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. She published her second monograph, Nicaragua, in 1981. Meiselas served as an editor and contributor to the book El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers and edited Chile from Within featuring work by photographers living under the Pinochet regime. She has co-directed two films, Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family and Pictures from a Revolution with Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti. In 1997, she completed a six-year project curating a hundred-year photographic history of Kurdistan, integrating her own work into the book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History and developed akaKurdistan, an online site of exchange for collective memory in 1998.

Her monograph Pandora’s Box  explores a New York S & M club, has been exhibited both at home and abroad. Encounters with the Dani reveals a sixty-year history of outsiders’ discovery and interactions with the Dani, an indigenous people of the highlands of Papua in Indonesia.

Meiselas has had one-woman exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, and her work is included in collections around the world. She has received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for her work in Nicaragua (1979); the Leica Award for Excellence (1982); the Engelhard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art (1985); the Hasselblad Foundation Photography prize (1994); the Cornell Capa Infinity Award (2005) and most recently was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal (2011). In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

OSU Event

Tomislav Z. Longinović: The Balkan Route: Space, Translation, Imagination

 

Tomislav Z. Longinović: The Balkan Route: Space, Translation, Imagination
Date: October 9, 2017, 1:30-3:00 pm
Location: Knowlton Hall 190

The influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East into Europe has challenged the existing notion of national boundaries and demonstrated an increased need for a public policy that would take into account problems arising from the forced movement of population on such a large scale. Media reporting of the crisis focuses on the plight of miserable migrants who are using Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary as transition points to reach the wealthier countries in Europe. Needless to say, countries comprising the European Union have had vastly differing responses to the issue of national boundaries and their permeability in the ongoing migration crisis.

This paper uses the innovative methodology of cultural translation to analyze this phenomenon by calling for a new understanding of trauma, space and identity in the Balkans in particular and Europe in general. Translation is understood here not only as a practice that transfers meaning in the narrow linguistic sense of the word, but also as the process by which broader social and political formations are carried over from one culture to another. Or, as the eminent Spanish language translator Gregory Rabassa said: “Every act of communication is an act of translation.” As global subjectivity becomes increasingly dominated by communication across languages and cultures, as well as between geographical and virtual spaces, the universe emerging among the interacting economies is characterized by processes of translation that alter the simplified imaginary perceptions of “others” that are currently built into the cultural unconscious of particular national imaginaries.

Posted by The Global Mobility Project at Ohio State on Monday, October 9, 2017

Research Methodology Workshop

Date: Tuesday, November 14, 1:00-2:30
Location: Enarson, Room 160

On Tuesday, November 14, 1:00-2:30 we will be hosting a discussion on Research Methodology.  The workshop will feature presentations from our faculty affiliates and team members.

Join the GMP affiliated faculty, Robin Judd (History), Hannah Kosstrin (Dance), Yana Hashamova (Slavic), Arati Maleku (Social Work), and Ryan Skinner (Music), as they discuss research methodologies related to questions of global mobility and migration.

Upcoming Lecture: Isis Nusair on Narratives of Syrian Migration in Germany

Date: Friday, October 20, 2017
Lecture: 12:00-1:30pm
Roundtable Discussion: 1:30-2:30pm
Where: 160 Enarson

The Middle East Studies Center will host Professor Isis Nusair (Denison University), who will lecture on her field research in Germany on how Syrian immigrants navigate the dominant narratives about their community.  She will take a close look at gendered narratives, and how women especially respond to these.

For more information, please go to MESC Events Calendar.

Following the lecture, there will be a roundtable discussion with graduate students.

 

Upcoming Events: The Work and Words of Filmmaker Dani Kouyaté at OSU

Ethnomusicology

The following events, made possible by a Global Mobility faculty research grant awarded to Associate Professor of Musicology Ryan Skinner, will be taking place over the next two weeks:

1. Monday, September 18, 2017 – 4:00pm to 5:30pm, 18th Ave. Library, Room 205:  A screening of filmmaker Dani Kouyate’s first (and award-winning) feature film, Keita: The Heritage of the Griot: https://music.osu.edu/events/musicology-lecture-dani-kouyate-film

Trailer for Keita: The Heritage of the Griot
Film
2. Monday, September 25, 2017 – 4:00pm to 5:30pm, 18th Ave. Library, Room 205: Conversation with filmmaker Dani Kouyaté and Professor Ryan Skinner On the role and significance of music and sound in the cinematic oeuvre of Dani Kouyaté.  Co-sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries:
Discussion
3. Tuesday, September 26, 2017 – 7:00pm to 9:00pm, Wexner Center for the Arts: A screening of Kouyaté’s most recent (and award winning) film, While We Live, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker.  Co-sponsored by the School of Music, African American and African Studies, French and Italian, Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Global Mobility Project, the Office of International Affairs, Ethnomusicology Program. https://music.osu.edu/events/musicology-lecture-kouyate-while-we-live

While We Live (Medan Vi Lever) – International trailer from DFM_FEATURES on Vimeo.

 

 

“Zionist Vipers and Jewish Pseudo-Nationalists:” Anti-Zionism, Liberalism, and Slavophobia in Interwar Greece

Paris Papamichos Chronakis
University of Illinois at Chicago

Tuesday, October 3, 2017
214 Denney Hall
3:30-5:00 pm

Please note this event co-sponsored by the Global Mobility Project, together with the Departments of History, Classics, and History of Art.

Love Notes for Dreamers

This may be of interest to those concerned with the uncertain future of DACA:

Members of the OSU community are organizing two interactive activities on the South Oval (behind Hagerty Hall) Wednesday, September 13th and Friday 15th from 9am-5pm for individuals to create and view messages of support for buckeyes affected by the DACA policy change. Messages will be collected throughout the week at various locations and turned into a visual collage on-site. In conjunction, they will be collecting signatures from faculty endorsing President Drake’s message on the DACA Decision.