Creative Ecologies and Decolonial Futures
Wow, what a transformative residency. From learning about the work of all the artist, curator and theorist/researcher participants, to spending quality time in San Cristóbal de las Casas and other parts of Chiapas, México, to visits to the Muy Gallery (dedicated to Mayan and Zoque art), a Zapatista Caracol and the El Paraiso collective at the coast, every experience was rich and full of learning.
Thanks so much to Natalia Arcos, Alessandro Zagato of CASA GIAP (Grupo de Investigacion en Arte y Politica), TJ Demos, presenters and all the participants for the conversations, dancing, comradeship and inspiration.
Puffin Foundation grant
So honored to receive funding from the Puffin Foundation for the research and film project I am working on. It the first grant we applied for! The working title is Place of the Big River (Kaniatarowanénhne) or On the Rough Waters (Kahnewake) and the project explores ecological, infrastructural and territorial entanglement at the St. Lawrence River. Artist and filmmaker Pawel Wojtasik is a primary collaborator and cinematographer. We still have way to go with funding, but this is an auspicious start. Thank you Puffin Foundation!
Listening to Dutch Kills – Chance Ecologies sound walk
I am excited about this project in my neighborhood of Long Island City and to be a participating artist, animating the presence of oysters in Dutch Kills and in the estuary at large. Listening to Dutch Kills is a new public art project created by Chance Ecologies. This project is an immersive audio walk that guides participants around the waters of the Dutch Kills tributary of Newtown Creek. The walk was commissioned by the SWIM Coalition, and curated by Catherine Grau, Sarah Nelson Wright and Nathan Kensinger, and includes new audio works by Nate Dorr, Edrex Fontanilla, Rachel Stevens, and Moira Williams. Please join us at the launch event on Saturday, June 29th!
More details on the walk and the SWIM Coalition can be seen here: https://www.swimmablenyc.org/dutch-kills-public-art-project/
And please RSVP for the launch event here, which includes an artists talk and picnic:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/getting-to-zero-cso-in-dutch-k…
Here is the view you will be facing during the oyster segment.
SCMS19 Conference – Remakes and Remediations panel
Excited to present at my first Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, this year in Seattle (SCMS19), and to share the bill with such great papers by Jessica Ruffin, Susan Felleman, and Grahame Weinbren (which included a new Georges Méliès remake). Thanks to Susan Felleman for chairing our panel, “Remakes and Remediations, Experimental and Impossible, in Theory and Praxis.”
The Unbearable Lightness of Drawing, Tripoli Cancelled, Gosse Interview
As we work to finalize Millennium Film Journal issue #69 I realize I have failed to mention what I’ve been up to in recent issues. For MFJ 67 I wrote a review of Naeem Mohaiemen‘s great film Tripoli Cancelled, which was on view at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City.
Senior Editor Grahame Weinbren and I interviewed Art Historian Johanna Gosse. Her essay called “Ways of Seeing After the Internet,” also published in MFJ 67, is on John Berger and Ways of Something, an artwork by Lorna Mills in which artists remake the visuals for one-minute segments of Berger’s classic television series Ways of Seeing. Grahame edited her interview into this video:
For MFJ 68 I wrote “The Unbearable Lightness of Drawing,” an inaugural Studio Visit feature profiling artist and animator Dustin Grella and Dusty Studio, located in the South Bronx. Rebecca Krasnik and I made a bunch of photographs. The launch screening for the issue was in November at Anthology Film Archives.