Contact Film Series: The Memory Album and A New England Document

2125 Adelbert Road,Cleveland OH 44106

01 November, 2022

Description

The Memory Album 2014 Director: Cinematic Migrations Workshop In 2012, Renée Green initiated in MIT a research project, Cinematic Migrations, which is still ongoing; to launch it, she invited John Akomfrah and Lina Gopaul from Smoking Dogs Film for a series of concentrated week-long visits during 2012-2014. In Akomfrah and Gopaul’s last visit, a short film was collaboratively produced, The Memory Album. Workshop participants provided moving image materials, texts, photographs, as well as sound recordings, not knowing what would become of all that was “thrown into the pot.” The process of making the film unfolded while the film was being woven together in the editing suite.​ Made of disparate materials, including an interview with an MIT professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, The Memory Album enacts a collective and active process of thinking, feeling, and sharing, while simultaneously attesting to the power of cinema to render memories into dream-like sequences, in relation to an ever-continuous material present. ​ Cinematic Migrations Workshop: Files and Sources: Lawrence Barriner II, Luke Chellis, Free Agent Media, Adi Hollander, Mary Jirmanus, Maggie Jordan, Ryan Kuo, Soyoung Kwon, Anne Macmilan, Ian Soroka, Ziyin Zhou Montage: Madeleine Gallagher, Mary Jirmanus, Ryan Kuo, Soyoung Kwon, Ian Soroka Interviews: Professor Matthew A. Wilson, Jesal Kapadia Readings: Lawrence Barriner II, Renée Green, Joan Jonas, Jesal Kapadia Text: Henry Dumas, ZZ Parker Animateurs: Renée Green, John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Javier Anguera, Free Agent Media, Smoking Dogs Films, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Art, Culture, and Technology Additional support: MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology, School of Architecture and Planning © Cinematic Migrations Workshop A New England Document 2020 Director: Che Applewhaite Using found footage with selected images and text from The Marshall Collection at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, A New England Document reconstructs the genocidal impulses of two ethnographers’ photographic encounters in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, from the perspective of its suppressed stories. The filmmaker, a Black international student at Harvard, and their daughter, New-York-Times-bestselling writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, give voice in fragmentary counterpoint upon sounds of archival ghosts. About the Contact Film Series: In conjunction with Contact, an exhibition conceived and organized by Renée Green for moCa Cleveland as part of FRONT International 2022, the artist has curated a film series expanding on the exhibition’s exploration of the poetics of relation. Beginning with the 1997 film Contact, an inspiration for the exhibition and a lens through which to interpret it, the series is an essential component of Green’s project. The series, screened in Case Western Reserve University’s Strosacker Auditorium, includes a wide breadth of films by Green, her peers, and filmmakers who have been influential to the artist’s practice. ​Presented in partnership with FRONT International and the Case Western Reserve Film Society.