Event

Q&A and screening of Juan’s new film Rehavi “Timekeepers”

Rehavi is the third audiovisual text released by Juan Castrillon about his research on Sufi Music in Istanbul. The film combines narrative and interviews as a way of crafting a style of ethnographic writing. The story of an old mechanical watch that is lost, found and circulated by different owners refers the ways in which music and Sufism resonate in Istanbul. The film lays out the tension between how the watch sounds like, the aural perspective each of the characters use to valuate it, and the unexpected encounter with its new owner. In this sense, the film presents a contemporary view of the profound philosophy of time and the animistic relationship between clocks, watches and human beings that, according to the musicologist Walter Feldman, have been ones of the main themes of the Turk-Ottoman culture. 

The film has a length of 30 minutes, and it is spoken in Spanish and Turkish languages with English subtitles. 

Juan Castrillon is anthropologist with 8+years of experience researching Sufi music practices in Turkey, and 3+ years researching Amazonian sonic practices in Colombia. His intellectual agenda explores the relation of bodies interacting with sound and general theories about space, imagination, and composite anatomies. Currently he is a third-year graduate student in ethnomusicology at the Department of Music of the University of Pennsylvania.