NARRATIVE INTERVENTIONS
SPEAKER SERIES
Museum of Art • Rhode Island School of Design
Spring 2023
Supported by the RISD Humanities Fund Grant
Addressing creative research into hidden histories, this speaker series was organized in alliance with my Spring 2023 RISD course: Narrative Interventions: Hidden Histories in Museums + Archives. Considering museum collections and institutional archives as a creative site of intervention, the series examined the ways in which artists and designers use interactive pedagogical approaches to question narrative and inform research practices. The conversations offered critical moments of departure to speculate the cause and compliance of complex global histories asking: how do we recognize absences and change the power structure of absence through visual storytelling?
Ana Flores
Shaman Ladders and Other Stories
Award-winning sculptor, ecologist, writer, educator, and RISD alumni Ana Flores creates works of art and installations that focus on the cultural narratives that help connect communities with landscapes. Her enduring interest in how geography shapes us comes from her own experience of displacement as a refugee from Cuba who came to the United States with her family. It was only when she settled in Charlestown, Rhode Island, in an area next to the sacred land of the Narragansett people, that she “began to reroot and find a sense of wholeness.” Inspired by mentors, such as forest stewards, gardeners, Narragansett elders and neighbors, Flores built a relationship with the land to forge creative research connecting deeply with place and ecology. She will discuss her studio process and upcoming exhibition at the Newport Art Museum featuring two recent series intertwining the complex poetics of ecosystemic histories from the forest next to her studio in Charlestown, RI to the Nova Scotian shore where she makes work from materials she finds in these landscapes.
Matthew Lawrence +
Jason Tranchida
Reviving Queer Histories
The artist duo discuss their research and efforts to bring to life a multimedia production featuring, “An Episcopal minister. 41 naval recruits. A zealous newspaper editor. A pandemic. A drag show. A beanstalk. The YMCA. And a future president of the US.” The queer recovery project Scandalous Conduct | Newport 1919 examines a US Navy-sanctioned raid on homosexual activity in Newport, RI at the end of World War I. An event, now obscured by history, that sparked a national scandal when sailors and civilian men alike were targeted in a covert operation against “immoral acts”. Awarded the Community Development Grant by the Brown Arts Initiative (BAI), the grant supported the development of an audio piece that premiered during the BAI’s Remaking the Real festival. Transhida and Lawrence re-imagine the creative space of documentary practice, mapping and shaping changing existences of marginalized cultures through historical records and archives to find "the real" in mixed, "virtual," and immersive realities.
Annu Palakunnathu
Matthew
Landscapes of Memory
Matthew’s photo-based artwork combines still and moving imagery using photography, video, sculpture, and sound, often beginning with a personal experience and evolving into larger collaborations with others to reveal lesser-known histories. Born in England, raised in India, Matthew describes herself as “transcultural, living between cultures.” A Providence-based visual artist, professor of photography, and former director of the University of RI Center for the Humanities, Matthew draws on archival photographs to confront the colonial archive to re-examine its historical narrative legacies in both the US and South Asia. Amongst Matthew’s many projects, she will discuss her recent work exploring ignored and unheard stories from India’s past. This includes Open Wound - Stories of Partition, utilizing photo-animation, installation and the work of The 1947 Partition Archive to address missing voices and the turmoil experienced by those who were displaced by the British India Partition; and The Unremembered - Indian Soldiers of World War II, a multimedia installation acknowledging the the complete erasure of contributions of Indian soldiers who volunteered to take up arms for their British colonial rulers.
