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January 1, 2022
From January 1 - 14, 2022, filmmakers Jason Livingston & Cathy Lee Crane will conduct ongoing field work in the borderlands of Southern Arizona.
From January 1-14, 2022, filmmakers Jason Livingston & Cathy Lee Crane will conduct ongoing field work in the borderlands of Southern Arizona. In March 2019, they gathered audio interviews, landscape photography, and cinematic stagings from Naco, Douglas, and Mule Mountain before heading farther south to Humberto de Hoyo’s ranch in Huarche [Cananea, Sonora]. Picking up where they left off in 2019 before the pandemic hit, Cathy and Jason will traverse the territory of the Gadsden Purchase to examine flows, boundaries, borders and archives. In exploring county records, mining landscapes, and the multi-layered historical processes that shape the region through rivers and fences, they will produce research, edit digital artifacts, and offer public events in the region.Cathy and Jason are working with artists Laurie McKenna and Erin Wilkerson to develop a novel, engaging way to create a database mix of their own digital outtakes from the Southwest alongside Bisbee community members’ video fragments. Whereas the logic of extraction is violently deliberate, the operative logic of this generative media work is generous, chance-based, and playful. They will gather this local material in the months preceding their assemblage work in Bisbee. In exchange for one week of studio space (January 2-8, 2022) at CSP, this local material will be included in a real-time sampled media piece between each of their own short films at the public screening. Screening on January 7, 2022 at the CSP: free and open to the public
(X)-trACTION begins and ends in Bisbee, Arizona. Local artists were invited to contribute observations of life in Bisbee which are included in tonight’s program as *interstitial seams* that make their way through the sequence of five artists’ films to form a meta mash-up deposit concerned for our climate, our workers, our history and future- the beauty and the failures. Whereas the logic of extraction is violently deliberate, the operative logic of this generative media work [aka tonight’s program] is generous, chance-based, and playful.Mid-century postcards, front and back, offer invaluable if obscured views in Nicole Antebi’s archival re-animation of Roberto López Díaz’s depictions of *la frontera*. Geography plays across multiple enactments in Cathy Lee Crane’s video, which asserts the primacy of water and migration in the dust of militarized landscapes. Laurie McKenna conjures desert punk power in an aggregate of memory and charcoal, and grounds national rupture in a sonic diary. Erin Wilkerson and Jason Livingston, in their contributions, draw poetic power lines through industry, reminding us that extraction, for all its local magnetism and metal lures, is a view into international dynamics. Running through the program are Letters from Bisbee, those ants, dollar store parking lots, and water spiders which place the screening in a specific space, the palimpsest sunbaked everyday life of the Borderlands. How is it that the societies we live in produce food deserts while the demand for satellite feeds goes up and up? What might a supply chain of simple hungry ants tell us? When we look at plastic bags hung to dry like laundry, do we welcome wind, that great renewable, to re-use? Does every cracked car windshield need repair? We extend our gratitude to Lizann Michaud, Pam Rodrigues, Jan Searle. Rafaela Valenzuela, Janet Reynolds, and Laurie McKenna for their participation.
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Cathy Lee Crane has charted a speculative history on film since 1994. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York State Council for the Arts for her cinematic innovations which combine archival material and staged live action. Her body of work received its first survey in 2015 as part ofthe American Original Now series at the National Gallery of Art. Her most recent film, *Crossing Columbus (2020), *a feature documentary is part of *Drawing the Line*, a multi-platform work about the Western Boundary of the US/Mexico border. This project was developed with fellowship support from the El Paso Community Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Research Center. She is Professor of Cinema at Ithaca College.
Jason Livingston is a media artist, film programmer, and writer. His writing has been published in *Media + Environment*, *The Brooklyn Rail*, and *Afterimage*. His award-winning creative work has screened widely, including Sheffield, Camden, Rotterdam, Anthology, the Austrian Museum, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. *Under Foot & Overstory* is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, and *Lake Affect* is available through Electronic Arts Intermix’s Experimental Television Center collection. Funded residencies include the Millay Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Jason is pursuing a practice-based PhD as a Presidential Fellow with the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. He holds a B.A in Philosophy from Cornell University, and a M.A. and M.F.A. in Cinema from the University of Iowa. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees with the Flaherty Seminar, one of the longest running independent documentary media arts organizations in the world.