ACTION: CINEMA AS CONNECTION PRESENTS MEMORY AND RESISTANCE: A WORKSHOP WITH MICHELLE DIZON
WORKSHOP FULL! STAY TUNED FOR MORE ACTION! WORKSHOPS IN 2019!
Saturday, November 10 and Sunday November 11; 1 – 5 PM EACH DAY
This free workshop is part of ACTION! Cinema as Connection, a series presenting documentary films and workshops by female filmmakers of color. ACTION! is made possible with the support of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
In this workshop, we will learn how to think and work expansively from the site of memory. For women and queers of color, memory exists not only as an experience from one’s past, but as the collective potential for future thought and action. Memory is fundamental to tracing not only the violence to which we have been subjected but also the tremendous resistance, resilience, and love across generations that allows us to be present here today. Together, we will try to understand how memory relates to history and politics, what different temporalities might be necessary to bear witness to our life worlds, what potential memory holds to determine different political futures, how our bodies might engage with memory and over and against the simultaneous of erasure and hypervisibility of our times.
Come to this workshop with one image from your past that means a lot to you. It should be an image of great intensity, something that stirs tremendous emotion for you when you look at it. Building off this image, we will move through a series of experiments in writing, research, sound, voice, image capture, image making, citation, editing, and presentation. This process of experimentation will guide each participant to a completed media project by the end of this two-day workshop.
From this workshop, participants can expect to gain the conceptual tools to think through the politics of memory, an experimental and process-based approach to projects based in memory, and an understanding of how meaning is produced by different kinds of images and different modes of presentation.
Space is limited with priority to women of color, LGBTQ populations, and low-income individuals ages 19-35. Call or email EPFC for more details.
Michelle Dizon is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside. The violence of imperialism and the intimate spaces of resistance within globalization form central pivots in her work which take the form of multi-channel video installations, multi-image slide projection, expanded cinema performances, essay films, photographs, discursive events, pedagogical platforms, and writing.
Dizon’s recent projects include Gaza Before the Law, a film about failure of the US legal system in matters of justice for Palestine, The Archive’s Fold, a multi-image slide installation that explores the violence of the US colonial archive by reading its images through seven generations of women in Dizon’s family, and White Gaze (with Viet Le), an artist’s book and photographic installation that poses a decolonial counterpoint to National Geographic and its legacy of imperialist visuality. Past projects of note include Perpetual Peace, a multichannel video installation about extractivism and ecological disaster in the Philippines, Basing Landscapes, a single-channel video installation about the gendered violence of neocolonial occupation, and Civil Society, a three-channel video installation that considers cultural memory through the lens of two events: the 2005 uprisings in the French banlieues and the 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles. Organizing and autonomous community building is central to Dizon’s aesthetic and political practice and she is the founder of at land’s edge, an autonomous decolonial initiative focused on nurturing the voices of artists of color in East and South Los Angeles.
Dizon has exhibited and lectured across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East at venues such as the Center for Women’s Studies (Zagreb, Croatia), Sursock Museum (Beirut, Lebanon), Caixaforum (Barcelona, Spain), Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Copenhagen, Denmark), Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), IASPIS (Stockholm, Sweden), Salasab (Bogotá, Colombia), Sumaryo Art Space (Jakarta, Indonesia), Vargas Museum (Manila, Philippines), Para/site Art Space (Hong Kong, China), Mind Set Art (Taipei, Taiwan), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, United States), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, United States), and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, United States).
Dizon has been honored with a Master Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles and with grants from Art Matters, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Human Rights Center. The relevance of her artistic practice to has been recognized in dissertations, scholarly books, and articles. She earned an MFA in Art with specialization in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley.
This event is fully booked.