Family

High Five usually comes across as absurd and silly, and generally gets a laugh when shown. I appreciate this response and agree it is quite ridiculous on the surface. However few know the true dark meaning of the piece, which was my personal contribution to a ceremony commemorating the twentieth anniversary of my mother's suicide.

A dark wave of incest and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole. Taking its title from the V.C. Andrews novel (a sequel to Flowers In The Attic), and weaving together texts from Shirley Jackson, William S. Burroughs, and Stevie Nicks, the film constructs a collaged narrative of three star-crossed siblings searching for one another across the unstable landscapes of their respective exiles.

-- Michael Robinson

The fragment contains within it an implied reference to something that was once whole. It suggests damage and violence, time and distance. These qualities I found were integral to my own constitution, and it was with the making of Cooperation Of Parts that this became clear.

“Misfortune makes and breaks you.” I have the misfortune of a history of disruptions, and the fortune of having that history to work with.

Border situations have inspired writers, artists and filmmakers, particularly within the context of divisions and border control within the Middle East. Who draws the borders? What are the effects of imposing them, of imposing checkpoints? This program looks at border situations. In the works presented here, we take a close look at the lines of demarcation, observing what happens on borders in divided Lefkosia (Nicosia), the occupied territories in Palestine, and at the excavation of the site of a former border in Lebanon which no longer exists.

This first program deals with stories of captivity. To start, Hostage: The Bachar Tapes by Walid Raad presents us with an imagined hostage presumably held in custody along with the American hostages in Lebanon during the 1980’s. Raad’s work reflects on the invention and communication of stories about abduction, insisting on the families’ unity in the face of threats, and reads through the fears and sexual fantasies of the kidnapped Americans who are held in the same cell with a Lebanese man.

Company Line is a film about one of the first predominately Black neighborhoods in Mansfield Ohio. The title, Company Line, refers to the name historically used by residents to describe their neighborhood, located on the north side of town close to the old steel mill. The Company Line began during the post–war migration of Blacks from the south to the north in the late 1940’s. The neighborhood was purchased in the early 1970’s and its residents were scattered throughout Mansfield.

An 11-minute tape focused on greenish night-vision textures and certain high-camp performance values, organized around a dysfunctional family "celebrating" several birthdays. We see an elderly woman in apparent dementia staring as her "party" goes on around her, squares of blood-red sheet cake passed around the bedside. Monologue fragments purvey tragic bitchitude, wherein any birthday is a mere occasion for embarrassment and cruelty.