[-empyre-] Week 4 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

Fri Apr 27 04:17:11 AEST 2018

Hi Dale, it’s sort of a long story (re. how I came to make this film) so I
will try and be brief here. It starts with an anecdote. When I was in my
early twenties, I went along on a road trip with two friends, one of whom
was doing some research in Alert Bay, one of whom was also First Nations
and had a connection to Alert Bay. I knew nothing about Alert Bay at the
time, yet I agreed to accompany this friend. To make a long story short, we
ended up partying with the women’s soccer team and I realized how powerful
and important soccer culture was in Alert Bay. It gave people status that
didn’t come from important families in the Kwakwaka'wakw system. Coming
from a mixed Latin American background, this was the first time I had seen
the fervour of "the beautiful game" (or football or soccer) in Canada. It
was a strong experience and it stayed with me. The land itself, this remote
island, resonated with me in an inexplicably powerful, spiritual, and
energetic way. Many years later, I received a grant for another project and
I naively thought I would stretch it and start this documentary. So that
was the genesis of the project. The choices of who and what to film were
done in a fairly cinema direct style where the characters often led the
action. I made contact with the coach of the women's soccer team and we
have since developed a beautiful friendship. So she agreed to the project
and it went from there. I remember, one of the former coaches, Honey, would
often say, you should film this person and you need to talk to so and so.
And, in fact, everyone I talked to had suggestions on who and what I should
film and I sort of went with it. And that's how it evolved and then of
course editing required a lot of choices.

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 10:28 AM, Dale Hudson <dmh2018 at nyu.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks, Sarah.
>
> I’m curious to know more about how you came to make this film and what
> governed some of your choices.
>
> Did you set about highlighting the role of football for these women and
> men, or did it develop as a larger part of the film in the process of
> making it?
>
> Best,
> Dale
>
>
> On Apr 24, 2018, at 10:55, Sarah Shamash <sarah at sarahshamash.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks for the invite to share here Dale. My very DIY documentary project
> is also about people and place and that inextricable relationship. Although
> I’m not sure what constitutes a "new media documentary practice", *Kwanxwala-Thunder
> *is about transporting the experience of a particular geography, history,
> community, and people. Namely, Alert Bay as part of traditional
> Kwakwaka'wakw territory on Canada’s Northwest coast and the island’s
> predominantly Indigenous, Kwakwaka'wakw soccer community, is explored
> through an experimental, impressionistic, essayist, cinema direct lens and
> ultimately a single-channel cinematic experience. There are genuine
> considerations for the ethics of documentary practices, methodologies and
> contexts of creation, formal treatments of images which comment on
> histories of representations and connect to the more general theme of the
> integration and indigenization of soccer into Kwakwaka'wakw contemporary
> culture in Alert Bay.
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Dale Hudson <dmh2018 at nyu.edu> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Thanks, Steve, Marianna, Daniel, Max, Philip, Adam, and Rachel, for
>> participating in last week’s discussion, which I hope will continue and
>> intersect with this week’s discussion.
>>
>> This week’s guests are Armando Minjarez Monarrez (MX), Ellie Beaudry
>> (US), Dawn Dawson-House (US), Sarah Shamash (BR/CA), Liz Miller (US/CA),
>> and Erin McElroy (US). All have participated in the “Invisible Geographies”
>> exhibition for the twentieth edition of FLEFF.
>>
>> Armando Minjarez Monarrez’s _Ulysses: New Hope in the Heartland
>> (AlieNation)_ documents the economic recovery of a village in so-called
>> heartland of the United States due
>>
>> Ellie Beaudry’s _Past, Present, Future Bund_ makes visible and visceral
>> the waxing and waning of air pollution in Shanghai. By dividing the screen
>> into three fields, she shows how some residents and tourists use financial
>> resources to help them adapt to differing air qualities, whereas others
>> must simply carry on.
>>
>> Dawn Dawson-House (US) is senior project leader for the South Carolina
>> African American Heritage Commission’s online travel guide _The Green Book
>> of South Carolina_, which recovers African American histories that are at
>> risk of being lost and evokes the terror faced by African Americans who
>> wanted or needed to travel on U.S. roadways in past decades.
>>
>> Sarah Shamash’s _Kwanxwala-Thunder_ recovers the history of the
>> Kwakwaka’wakw and stitches it together with contemporary stories of
>> football and potlach in Canada.
>>
>> Liz Miller’s _The Shore Line_ allows users to navigate the effects of
>> climate change on coastal communities around the globe. Users gain insights
>> into ways that local populations who are most vulnerable confront global
>> problems.
>>
>> Erin McElroy (US) cofounded the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, which
>> attempts to combat the dispossession of communities to gentrification
>> projects in the Silicon Valley by visualizing data, aggregating narratives,
>> and mobilizing resistance to eviction-friendly platforms like Airbnb.
>>
>> I look forward to hearing more from them about these projects.
>>
>> Best,
>> Dale
>>
>>
>> Bios:
>>
>> Armando Minjarez (MX) is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist, designer,
>> and community organizer. His practice is guided by themes of displacement,
>> collaboration, and empowerment to open up spaces for the development of
>> social change strategy and creative expression. He is cofounder of The Seed
>> House~La Casa de la Semilla, founder of the art collective ICT ARMY of
>> Artists, and co-founder of the North End Urban Arts Festival. Minjarez has
>> traveled, conducted research, and facilitated workshops and trainings on
>> racism, displacement, migration and creative expression in Canada, Europe,
>> México, and the United States. His work has been featured on the _New York
>> Times_, _Buzzfeed_, _C Magazine_, and published in peer-reviewed scientific
>> journals.
>>
>> Ellie Beaudry (US) is an undergraduate student at Cornell University
>> (United States), where she studies environmental engineering and fine arts.
>> Born in Shanghai (China) but raised in New Jersey (United States),
>> Beaudry’s videos draw upon her experience when she returned to Shanghai in
>> high school. She seeks to address environmental issues through art and
>> engineering.
>>
>> Dawn Dawson-House (US) is an ex-officio member of the Commission from the
>> South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism and a senior
>> project leader for the Green Book of South Carolina. The South Carolina
>> African American Heritage Commission identifies and promotes the
>> preservation of historic sites, structures, buildings, and culture of the
>> African American experience in South Carolina. It also assists and enhances
>> the efforts of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.
>>
>> Sarah Shamash (BR/CA) is a Vancouver-based media artist and Ph.D.
>> candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at the University of
>> British Columbia (Canada). Her experimental projects typically explore
>> identities and geographies as personal, political, feminine, and dynamic,
>> while critiquing and subverting fixed, colonial, and hegemonic demarcations
>> of the body, territory, and space. She has exhibited in art venues and film
>> festivals internationally. She currently teaches film theory and programs
>> films for the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. Her work as an
>> artist, researcher, educator, and programmer can be understood as
>> interconnected and whole; they all revolve around a passion for cinema and
>> social justice.
>>
>> Liz Miller (CA/US) is an independent documentary-maker, trans-media
>> artist, and professor at Concordia University in Montréal, who lived in
>> Central and South America for more than six years. She is committed to
>> producing work that connects individuals across cultures. Over fifteen
>> years of community media experience and a background in political
>> economics, electronic media art, and Latin American studies fuel her
>> exploration of new media as art and as an educational tool for community
>> collaborations.
>>
>> Erin McElroy cofounded the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project in 2013, and
>> continues to co-lead the project today with a team of volunteer activists,
>> data scientists, cartographers, oral historians, programmers, and more. She
>> is also a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies at University of
>> California Santa Cruz, working on a project on techno-utopics, racialized
>> dispossession, and postsocialist analytics in the Bay Area and in Romania.
>> Some of her writing on the project can be found at
>> https://ucsc.academia.edu/ErinMcELroy.
>>
>>
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