THE STORIES LEFT OUT
These works are collected as a demand for the inclusion of Critical Race Theory in educational mandates and discourse. The grotesque fightback against this, in favor of maintaining white history and the whitewashing of settlement and colonial brutality, racism, and genocide, is an injustice that minimalizes the violence inflicted in the past, leaving these actions to continue as a cyclical trauma. These works are on the stories left out. There are so many more to tell too. It is time to acknowledge them, and in turn, create space for true liberation.
Landmark
Sahal Hassan
Landmark is a meditation on public memory and public space in the shadow of chattel slavery. Sahal Hassan is a multimedia artist working primarily in video and photography. His research interests revolve around Atlantic visual and print cultures and new media, and he is based between Brooklyn, NY and Vancouver, BC.
We Can Not Love What We Do Not Know
Kelly Sears and Alex Johnston
We Cannot Love What We Do Not Know interrogates the Trump Administration's reactionary 1776 Project, laying bare its cynical, divisive, and factually incorrect take on American history. The film exposes the 1776 Project for the farce that it is, a faulty fortification against urgent attempts to write more inclusive histories that reckon with America's violent legacy of racism, exclusion, exploitation, and genocide; taking viewers on a chilling and phantasmagoric journey into the paranoid soulless soul of right-wing historical propaganda.
Abigail DeVille Listens To History
From the Art21 digital series New York Close Up
The new migration processions came to be in the days following a ten-day tour through the south traveling to main stops on the Seaboard Coast Rail Line, a major thoroughfare for the Great Migration. My family traveled from Richmond, Virginia, to Harlem and later the Bronx using the rails. In each city, we stopped at visitor centers and crafted our navigation tour through the murky waters of history taking African American history tours, plantation tours, and looking for unofficial history wherever we could find it. I was picking up scraps of materials, such as palm fronds in Charleston, wood in North Carolina. I made a chicken wire net that ties all of this debris together. The land holds memory and bears witness. History is experiential, and how we understand how it defines our lives is limited. I hope to find new methods that might go beyond our fragmented understanding of who we are. In the Anacostia and Harlem performances, the chicken wire debris garment was worn by black male performers, literally carrying the weight of history on their backs.
Series Producer: Nick Ravich. Producer & Director : Wesley Miller. Editor: Anna Gustavi. (2018) - Courtesy Art21, art21.org, founded 1997
Not All Visionaries Look Forward
Lydia Moyer
The eye of Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the 1619 project paired with the voice of Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist and Stanford professor. All footage/sound from YouTube. Lydia Moyer lives and works outside Charlottesville, VA.
The Full Benefits of Aboriginal Equality
Erin Wilkerson
To commemorate the 200 year anniversary of Britain claiming Australia, an aboriginal man claimed the White Cliffs of Dover, for his people. Erin Wilkerson is an internationally exhibited American artist and filmmaker, based out of Singapore, dedicated to investigations of physical and cognitive borderlands. She is co-founder of Creative Agitation, and is currently a TransArt PhD candidate.
One Survives by Hiding
Esy Casey
This is an elegy to the women whose lives were taken at three Atlanta spas this past spring, targeted by the shooter to relieve his sex addiction. ‘R&R’ is military slang for ‘rest and recuperation’, as using the body of a woman to combat the trauma of battle. War shaped the body of my mother, and her features in mine, continue to incite jokes about sexual violence. The connection between immigration and the countries whose infrastructures, economies and environments were ruined by US presence remains unseen. My family survived by hiding these atrocities from the children they raised in the US, genuinely wanting to protect us from the past. But keeping them hidden lets the violence survive too.
Excerpts from Newsreel 65 - "We Have too Much Things in Heart..."
An online project, where the series of video fragments is accompanied by a booklet – Newsreel Shreds, with contributions by: Tara Najd Ahmadi, Andreja Hribernik, Jošt Franko, Ciril Oberstar, and Andrej Šprah.
In the proximity of Croatia, Italy, and Slovenia, there is a small place that is the site of unimaginable human suffering. It is a place of numerous attempts and failures, marked by inexhaustible patience and small expectations, separated from the European Union by forests, hills, and rivers of police brutality, violence, and abuse of power; crossed with unimaginable effort. The journey through the forest on the EU border takes between ten and fifteen days. The refugees call it a Game – an exercise in hiding from the gaze of others. The Newsreel 65 project provides a broken insight into this place, marked by the daily attempts and failures of the refugees trying to cross the border of the European Union, and into the solidarity of the local community.
Excerpts from Newsreel 65 - "We Have too Much Things in Heart..." continued,,,
Excerpts from Newsreel 65 - "We Have too Much Things in Heart..." continued,,,
Pine and Genesee
Kelly Gallagher
A short experimental documentary about the site of a former stop on the Underground Railroad, the erasure of history, and what we owe those who came and struggled before us.
Mighty Bright Light
Robert Orlowski
A juxtaposition between a camera experiment and the song, “Mighty Bright Light”, sung by the prisoners at the Ramsey and Retrieve State Farm prisons in Texas, 1951, allows for a moment to contemplate the structural and thematic similarities between the two. In turn, the light from the present that exposes the film, and the light from the past that is the subject of the song are brought into question.
Mighty Bright Light is an anthem of struggle towards an abolitionist imagination.
Counter Storytelling
Cathy Lee Crane
Drawing the Line is a multiple-platform hybrid documentary film project that confronts the legacy of the US/Mexico Border Survey Commission (1850-1853), charged with marking the Western boundary between Mexico and the United States, following the Mexican-American War, aka the North American Invasion. The borderlands remain a contested territory; a contact zone the line itself bisects. This project was developed with support from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship in 2018.
Cathy Lee CRANE has crafted lyrical films of speculative history since 1994. She is the recipient of the 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video. She has been named 2020/21 Artist in Residence at the Farocki Institut in Berlin. Crane is Professor of Film at Ithaca College.
Make a Distinction
Andrew Mausert-Mooney & Kera MacKenzie
Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney are Chicago-based interdisciplinary artists working primarily in film, video, live broadcast, and installation. Their works have screened and exhibited at venues including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the American Film Institute, Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, UnionDocs, and Chicago Underground Film Festival.
Diaspora Prayer of the Refugees Grandchild
Anna Talhami
Anna Talhami is a poet, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist whose work has been presented in Rattle Magazine, the Theopoetics Conference, the Library of Congress, the United States Holocaust Museum, and elsewhere.
We Learn
Buñuelos Comunidad Creativa
A Historical social narrative of global Western culture focused on the construction of borders, differences, privileges, abuse and a generalized environment of human mistrust, has been created to the point of rationalizing and justifying its crisis in manifestations such as racism. With the recent conflicts of racist violence, a cycle of cultural history is repeated, with a unique opportunity that opens up to see through time: the origin of that violence and how we can learn from it.
Buñuelos Comunidad Creativa is a Mexico City based artist collective devoted to cinema and transmedia projects, with a special interest in fiction, experimental cinema and documentaries that address social issues
The Race Question
Travis Wilkerson
Nelson Peery on the "Race Question" in America. Nelson Peery was active in revolutionary politics for 76 years until his death on September 6, 2015. He remains one of the towering radical US intellectuals of the past century, with an importance and influence just beginning to be adequately recognized. Peery’s death prompted members of the Platypus Affiliated Society to recover and transcribe the recordings of interviews conducted some years earlier. The first interview, conducted by Edward Remus on September 13, 2011, was broadcast live on the Chicago- based radio station WHPK 88.5 FM. The high contrast images accompanying his remarks were shot in the heart of the Black Belt - Alabama, as part of the filming of "Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?"