We invite UC Santa Cruz undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty to join us for a field trip to San Francisco area museums February 1, 2018.
In An Opera of the World, Malian filmmaker Manthia Diawara reflects upon the refugee crisis and the relationship between Europe and Africa. The film revolves around a performance of Bintou Were, a Sahel Opera in Bamako, around which Diawara builds a story about migration, interweaving interviews with documentary and archival footage. An Opera of the World first premiered at dOCUMENTA 14 in Kassel, Germany.
For Traction, Diawara will be discussing his filmic practice, particularly focusing on An Opera of the World, 2016. An Opera of the World is a staging of Wasis Diop's Bintu Were, A Sahel Opera in Bamako, Mali in 2008 – a pioneering work telling the story of migration from West Africa to Europe by combining traditional Malian music with the structure of the Western operatic art form.
Leonardo Art & Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) is an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists, scientists, and scholars together for informal presentations and conversations. For this Best of LASER, the IAS has invited back crowd favorites from the last five years of events and will feature presentations by evolutionary (paleo) biologist Beth Shapiro, glaciologist Slawek Tulaczyk, director and filmmaker Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, and evolutionary marine biologist Rita Mehta.
