Create a movement phrase remix and a written remix integrating parts of each of our gestures and words from our creative responses #1.
We can add words/phrases/images/metaphors from our meeting minutes.
Post on blog by January 16th 2017.
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Borders Resurfacing: Shy's creative response 1
3 movements: all passwords are "gesture"
Gesture 1 not a pretty beach from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.
Gesture 2 marked suspicious from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.
Gesture 3 backfire... from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.
photos: Long Beach, Dec 2016
Excerpt of my free write (I bolded the phrases I used for movement inspirations):
"It's not a pretty beach" I usually warn visitors, so their expectations are not too high. My visitors first notice the well manicured island with palm trees and a few tall narrow structures that look like small condos. Wealthy get away? Theme park? No, it's an oil island. Long Beach is built on oil? Guilt on oil? Where does it go? We still buy imported gas! Our 1900 miles of pipeline built on Tongva land (quoting a FB post from Jools) is a tiny reflection of the DAPL: So much can be hidden under water until the inevitable moment of structural fail as human's imperfect creations backfire into spluttering bubbles of wing destroying sludge. (I don't usually say that to my guests!) When they look past the island, to the right, in the distance, it's all rigs and cranes and metal frames that clog the horizon. That's the Port of LA. It was there, at the edge of my adopted city, that a Pakistani-American I once knew, lost his import export business because his incoming crates were marked suspicious after 9-11, never again to be released. Could they still be sitting there is some forgotten lot?
Gesture 1 not a pretty beach from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.
Gesture 2 marked suspicious from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.
Gesture 3 backfire... from Shyamala Moorty on Vimeo.
photos: Long Beach, Dec 2016
Excerpt of my free write (I bolded the phrases I used for movement inspirations):
"It's not a pretty beach" I usually warn visitors, so their expectations are not too high. My visitors first notice the well manicured island with palm trees and a few tall narrow structures that look like small condos. Wealthy get away? Theme park? No, it's an oil island. Long Beach is built on oil? Guilt on oil? Where does it go? We still buy imported gas! Our 1900 miles of pipeline built on Tongva land (quoting a FB post from Jools) is a tiny reflection of the DAPL: So much can be hidden under water until the inevitable moment of structural fail as human's imperfect creations backfire into spluttering bubbles of wing destroying sludge. (I don't usually say that to my guests!) When they look past the island, to the right, in the distance, it's all rigs and cranes and metal frames that clog the horizon. That's the Port of LA. It was there, at the edge of my adopted city, that a Pakistani-American I once knew, lost his import export business because his incoming crates were marked suspicious after 9-11, never again to be released. Could they still be sitting there is some forgotten lot?
Resurfacing Borders Creative Response #1
Freewrite:
I wonder I can't imagine the possibility that I might see boats, rafts, people coming in out of the horizon. Stumbling onto this edge between sand and water. What happens. Why does someone make that treacherous journey. Why does someone risk their life. I don't have answers. Except to those people who don't value human life. Refugee life. Migrant life. Brown skin. Black life. The reasons why people make these journeys. Not to colonize or dominate. But for personal reasons. To save their life. To change their life. Roaring. Constant. Ebbing. Rushing. Crashing. Flowing. Can I see people making their way from the horizon to where I stand. But it's happening. As I stand here. As we do this. People are risking their lives to save their lives. Right now. Always. Pelican. Flies. Across. Sky.
PW: waterborders1
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Borders Resurfacing: Cyn Creative Assignment 1
The following material is of the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz, CA, once the site of Chinatown (or nearby and essential to the life of Chinatown residents).
1) Video and Pics
San Lorenzo River from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password "chinatown"
2) Freewrite: Dec 16, 2016
I sit, ass on concrete, wind chilling skin through clothes, the steady zoom and surge of cars at my back. The riverwalk. A man walks by pulling a bag on wheels, another with arms tucked into his T-shirt to shield against the cold, a bicyclist in high tech gear whooshes by smoothly. The river is brown and overgrown with scrub brush and fallen trees, the water fast-moving from yesterday’s rains. It is not beautiful here. This is no place for bougie hipsters to drink overpriced coffee in the sun. My body alert, unsure whether it is “safe” here where I am perched next to a trashcan chained to a metal pole, yellow heart shaped leaves decomposing in the mud, people with their belongings strapped to bicycles in trash bags. It is hard to imagine those lost bodies, those child bodies, George Ow and Young Lee fishing steelhead trout, catching little frogs and river creatures: the way play looked before capitalism took over. Wooden houses perched rickety on stakes above the water, so precarious, so precious, so easily swept away. In the memory of my imagination, it is always summer, not this damp chill to the bone, concrete seeping cold into my ass, this winter of unremembering.
3) Movements
Borders Resurfacing Santa Cruz from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password "river"
1) Video and Pics
San Lorenzo River from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password "chinatown"
I sit, ass on concrete, wind chilling skin through clothes, the steady zoom and surge of cars at my back. The riverwalk. A man walks by pulling a bag on wheels, another with arms tucked into his T-shirt to shield against the cold, a bicyclist in high tech gear whooshes by smoothly. The river is brown and overgrown with scrub brush and fallen trees, the water fast-moving from yesterday’s rains. It is not beautiful here. This is no place for bougie hipsters to drink overpriced coffee in the sun. My body alert, unsure whether it is “safe” here where I am perched next to a trashcan chained to a metal pole, yellow heart shaped leaves decomposing in the mud, people with their belongings strapped to bicycles in trash bags. It is hard to imagine those lost bodies, those child bodies, George Ow and Young Lee fishing steelhead trout, catching little frogs and river creatures: the way play looked before capitalism took over. Wooden houses perched rickety on stakes above the water, so precarious, so precious, so easily swept away. In the memory of my imagination, it is always summer, not this damp chill to the bone, concrete seeping cold into my ass, this winter of unremembering.
3) Movements
Borders Resurfacing Santa Cruz from Cynthia Ling Lee on Vimeo.
password "river"
Thursday, December 15, 2016
Resurfacing Borders Assignment 1: Babli's Response
Here is a video of the Salzach river near my house in Salzburg, filmed a few days ago, as well as photos from meeting point of the rivers Saalach and Salzach a few kilometers ahead, which I have taken previously.
reconstructed freewrite:
3 Gestures/Movements, password: Salzach:
Borders Resurfacing Assignment 1 from Sandra Chatterjee on Vimeo.
The Saalach in that area is the border between Austria and Germany, the Salzach in parts as well.
I am also added a link to pictures from the news in summer 2015 of the Saalach River and the border.
My video with gestures below is super simple. I am sitting, because sick.
Video: Password: Salzach
Photos by Sandra: Saalach Spitz, where the two rivers meet:
Saalach, border river, when the border had not re-surfaced yet.
reconstructed freewrite:
Salzach- a body of water - so close to my house, source of calm, source of beauty, and
and and peace. I exhale when I cross
the bridge from the station to get to my house a sign of having arrived. Most
places I go in this town I get to walk or bike along the river, cherishing the beauty even as I transition from
one office to another filing taxes.
About 15 minutes by bike up the river the Salzach meets another river: the Saalach. Saalach
Spitz where the two rivers meet- a beautiful oasis. Forgetting the border it signifies
politically/geographically- between Germany and Austria..
That blissful forgetting changed when the Saalach became a
site of hope and despair, when the
border was closed, as thousands of people fleeing from Syria wanted to pass.
3 Gestures/Movements, password: Salzach:
Borders Resurfacing Assignment 1 from Sandra Chatterjee on Vimeo.
News photos:
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
Borders Resurfacing Creative Assignment 1!
1) Film a 30 second video clip of a body of water near you, OR take a photo series of 5 images of a body of water near you.
2) Do a 5 minute free-write about that body of water. Don’t stop writing for the 5 minute free-write and be at the body of water.
3) Pull out 3-5 images, words or phrases that seem important to you from your free-write and create 3-5 movements/gestures related to those words. Keep it as simple or complicated - as you're feeling! If this feels relevant to you - think about who is affected in our worlds by everything going on as something to keep in mind for our free-write (undocumented, indigenous, black, LGBTQI, specific people whom we have mentioned... etc)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)