NOTE: The tour will take place from 10:30-11:00 am. (The second tour formerly listed from 11:15-11:45 am is canceled.)

You're invited to join a guided tour of the 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium Exhibition on the theme of "FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture and Urbanism," which highlights the work of leading creative experts around the world. The exhibition at Cornell (February 28-March 23) explores and integrates regional cultural, material, technological, and spatial practices in the rural-urban territories of East and Southeast Asia.

Through a collection of visual materials and augmented reality (AR) experiences, the exhibition provides an immersive and interactive experience of works that challenge preconceived notions of the rural-urban binary and propose exciting potentials for rethinking construction technologies, sustainability, and citizen agency in the built environment.

The exhibition features the work of 1+1>2 Architects, Amateur Architecture Studio, ArchiUnion, Bangkok Project Studio, DnA Design and Architecture, Drawing Architecture Studio, Future Cities Laboratory, Rural-Urban Building Innovation Laboratory, Rural Urban Framework, Studio Anna Heringer, SUP Atelier. Meeting location: Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium, Milstein Hall. Led by Hanxi Wang, Architecture Design Teaching Fellow. This tour is co-hosted by the Cornell China Center, Cornell Rural-Urban Building Innovation Lab, East Asia Program, and Southeast Asia Program.

Register here.

Sony Coráñez Bolton will be talking about his book Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines. He is an assistant professor Latinx and Latin American Studies and Spanish at Amherst College. The event is sponsored by the CNY Humanities Corridor Group “Global Disability Studies” with co-sponsorship from Southeast Asia Program, Romance Studies, and Asian American Studies Program.

This event is also available via webinar if you are unable to attend in person. Please register at: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_WWts_q-jQ8ewLeG37PWo5Q

Host Nation by Ko-woon Lee (2016, 116 minutes)

“Do you want to work in Korea?” Thus begins twenty-six-year-old Filipina woman Maria’s two-year journey into the sex industry in South Korea, which mainly caters to American soldiers stationed there.

Host Nation chronicles Maria’s hopes, dreams, and crucial reality for two years to lay bare the legalized system of sex trafficking between South Korea and the Philippines. Maria had long dreamed about escaping from her slum neighborhood in Davao, Philippines, and getting a job abroad and when she was introduced to a talent manager, Madam Yolie, it seemed her dream was about to come true.

Yolie, who operates a training center and a temporary boarding house in Manila for women, has witnessed the ups and downs of the sex industries of neighboring Asian countries and sees the openings in the industry as job opportunities for poor Filipino women.

The documentary follows Maria’s pathway into the South Korean sex industry via the E-6 visa, the so-called “entertainers’ visa,” slowly revealing the vast network of cross-border profit makers who enable sex trafficking, including a talent scout, a manager in Manila, a Korean broker, a Korean club owner and even Korean government agencies.

Part of the series Power of Seeing 보는 이의 권력 hosted by the East Asia Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Film website: www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/films/index/filmsView.jsp?movieCd=20164198

In Korean, Tagalog and English with English subtitles.

Generously cosponsored by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Cornell Society for the Humanities.

Professional Directions: A Conversation with Documentary Filmmaker – David Siev (BAD AXE)

March 16th, 4:30–5:30 p.m., Film Forum at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts (430 College Ave.)

A screening of BAD AXE, directed by David Siev, will happen on March 16th at 7:00 p.m., followed by a Q&A at Cornell Cinema. For more information, visit cinema.cornell.edu.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Performing and Media Arts, Southeast Asia Program (SEAP), Asian American Studies Program (AASP), Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity, and the Cornell Cinema.

About David Siev
Midwest-born and raised, David is a first-generation Cambodian-Mexican-American filmmaker. Prior to directing his SXSW award-winning feature debut, BAD AXE, David attended the University of Michigan film school. He spent his early career embracing the versatility of guerrilla filmmaking, working on various projects under director Jeff Tremaine including BAD TRIP (Netflix), THE DIRT (Netflix). He first made waves in the Asian-American festival circuit with the debut of his award-winning short film based on his father's experience of surviving the "killing fields" titled YEAR ZERO. The film would go on to win Best Narrative Short awards from the DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival, Vancouver Asian Film Festival, Manhattan International Film Festival, and several others. David now lives in New York City and is focused on developing narrative and documentary projects.

In his new book Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor, Isaac examines how contracted service labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States generates vital affects, multiple networks, and other life-worlds as much as it disrupts and dislocates human relations. Affective labor and time are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, musical performance, ethnography, and documentary film. Exploring these cultural practices, Filipino Time traces other ways of sensing, making sense of, and feeling time with others, by weaving narratives of place and belonging out of the hostile but habitable textures of labor-time. Signaling his current research project in this talk, Isaac explores live-streamed funeral vigils, a technological practice made necessary by Filipino diasporic life, to highlight two Tagalog concept-words that map other ways to generate ecologies of communality: pakiramdam (literally, to make oneself felt, or to feel a presence), affective engagement without immediate proximity; and kapiling, to be in someone's proximity or vicinity without interaction between two parties. Migrant subjects harness time and the imagination in their creative, life making capacities to make communal worlds out of one steeped in the temporalities and logics of capital.

Co-sponsored by: Asian American Studies Program, Department of Asian Studies, Department of Literatures in English, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and Southeast Asia Program (SEAP)

Dr. Allan Punzalan Isaac is Professor of American Studies and English and Associate Humanities Dean at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ. He specializes in Asian American and comparative race studies and examines issues around migration, postcoloniality, gender and sexuality, and the Philippines and its diaspora. His first book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America was the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award. His second book is entitled, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor. He has taught at DeLaSalle University-Taft in Manila, Philippines as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. His current research focuses on death and dying in the Filipino diaspora.

As part of the Threads of History exhibition series, Kroch Asia presents Textiles of Asia: Patterns & Processes.

There is a rich history of textiles in Asia. From the animal-skin clothing of the Ainu to the intricate weaving of silk, Asian cultures have showcased their artistry through their textiles for centuries. Textiles of Asia: Patterns and Processes covers a multitude of fabrics, designs, and production techniques created by indigenous cultures and those imported through trade and travel.

Exhbit runs February 16th - October 31st, 2023 in the Kroch Asia Exhibition Space.

Contact AsiaRef@cornell.edu for questions or more information.

FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture & Urbanism
The FRINGE is an ambiguous and ubiquitous patchwork of zones forming a wide range of territorial landscapes that can be characterized as neither distinctly urban nor distinctly rural. Imbued with narratives driven by unrelenting and perpetual urbanization, the FRINGE serves as a global engine for urban growth, a site for extractive industries, a territory for agricultural and technological productions, and a continuous land supply for architectural production and the expansion of urbanites. Formerly understood as peripheral, these rural-urban zones constitute new conceptual centers for architecture and urbanism, from generating innovative and adaptive material usage to redefining spatial adjacency between agricultural and urban landscapes. Emerging as the predominant context for current and future urban development, the FRINGE embodies contradicting adjacencies that are situated between the local-specific and the urban-generic and outside the preconceived binaries of urban versus rural, natural versus manmade, or remote versus connected.

Containing some of the world's most intensely altered rural-urban contexts, East and Southeast Asia have provided a fertile seedbed for research on global FRINGE architecture and urbanism. Bringing together innovative design and research through the lens of the built environment, this symposium questions: How do the material and technological changes brought about by urbanization collide with the spatial, cultural, and social practices of the rural? How do such meetings create or alter the special conditions of agency and interconnection, from the digital to the traditional, from the informal to the infrastructural, within the rural-urban?

Kicking off with a keynote lecture and the first panel in Beijing on March 2 (co-hosted with the Cornell China Center), the symposium will continue with a second panel at the Milstein Hall on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York, on March 3. An accompanying exhibition will be on view in the Bibliowicz Family Gallery from February 28 to March 23. The symposium and the accompanying exhibition aim to unpack the FRINGE's spatial, ecological, and technological capacities to reveal innovative design strategies that strive to be more environmentally conscious, socially equitable, and architecturally adaptive.

The Preston H. Thomas series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, New York, in memory of their son, Preston. The symposium events are free and open to the public.

The Beijing panel of the symposium is co-hosted and co-sponsored by the generous support of the Cornell China Center.

Organized by Architecture Assistant Professor Leslie Lok; coordinated by Design Teaching Fellow Hanxi Wang. Exhibition assistant Jialiang (Hunter) Huang; Augmented Reality interface support by Yichen Jia.

The 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium Exhibition highlights the work of leading creative experts around the world that explores and integrates regional cultural, material, technological, and spatial practices in the rural-urban territories of East and Southeast Asia. Through a collection of visual materials and augmented reality (AR) experiences, the exhibition provides an immersive and interactive experience of works that challenge preconceived notions of the rural-urban binary and propose exciting potentials for rethinking construction technologies, sustainability, and citizen agency in the built environment.

The exhibition features the work of:

1+1>2 Architects, Amateur Architecture Studio, ArchiUnion, Bangkok Project Studio, DnA Design and Architecture, Drawing Architecture Studio, Future Cities Laboratory, Rural-Urban Building Innovation Laboratory, Rural Urban Framework, Studio Anna Heringer, SUP Atelier

Learn more about the 2023 Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium "FRINGE: New Centers for Architecture and Urbanism."