A Fierier Music Falls addresses that constant in human history, migration. I had in mind to combine excerpts dealing with "woman as other" from Medea by Euripides with Stornelli d'esilio (Exile Song). Stornelli d'esilio, and italian anarchist song, has a passage that translates as "the whole world is my nation, and my law is liberty". The animation collages images that refer to settler colonialism, unfree labor, and the history of policing as oppression. Stornelli d'esilio is sung by the Sing in Solidarity Chorus, a socialist chorus of which I am the design facilitator. The video includes fragments of Brecht's Cannon Song, performed by Joe Therrien, a fellow member of People's Puppets of Occupy Wall Street.

"The Luxury You Deserve" seeks to reconcile a visceral reaction to the 2016 US presidential election with an understanding of the neocolonial structures that have made our present situation possible.

 

"Eye of the Sun, Eye of the Moon" is about being a New Yorker in Cairo. It was made in response to the abandoned set for Aida behind the Cairo Opera House. It combines live footage with animated images culled from children’s history books, Egyptian magazines, and other sources. The video addresses the difficulty in reading images, the subjectivity of knowledge, and cultural miscommunication. The text is a lipogram about the pharaonic god of writing, orderly thought, and the arts: Thoth. My understanding of him is limited. Still, I sometimes hope that he will help me as I try to think clearly, wrestling with the adage, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

 

A Song of Souls Along Gowanus is a collaborative animated video about water use and the Gowanus Canal. The video stems from a series of local Shadowing Our Waterways workshops in Brooklyn centered on two federal Superfund sites: Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal. Participants visited and read about the waterways, and made puppets and poems based on their research. The images and text in the animation came from the workshops. The Brooklyn project was sponsored by the Brooklyn Arts Council. There was a parallel project in Cairo, Egypt, in which participants from the Jesuit Animation School studied the Nile and made a collaborative video based on their research. The Cairo and Brooklyn teams videoconferenced in July 2016 and made a collaborative drawing. This is a But a Shadow of Myself project, facilitated by Alexandra Zevin. http://butashadow.net/

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"Joseph, Alexandra and Alien Activity" was made in response to a chance 2003 meeting with Joseph, and artist working in a New York City subway tunnel. The project combines a live interview with animation.