Still Waters Run Deep, Troubling The Archive with filmmaking and photography

Catalog description

Using lens-based filmmaking and photography as a form of storytelling, students will create individual projects that explore their own family, community, environmental histories, and narratives. How has your identities or historical context been flattened, simplified, or erased? How have they been shaped, transformed, and uplifted? How has your relationship to the land affected your current social, political, or environmental circumstances? What tools can we employ as creatives to re-dress the past and rebuild new relationships to self and community? We will watch works by artists of color and read essays by Saidiya Hartman, Alice Walker, and Fred Moten. We will explore how our narratives challenge knowledge production while connecting past to present. Students will identify an archive to use as source material for a personal project. They will use filmmaking and or photography to intervene in or trouble that archive. No experience required. This course is presented by the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA)