Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

UnionDocs is delighted to bring together a night in collaboration with Fordham University and their Center for Community Engaged Learning and Visual Arts Program, to ask how we might embody found histories. Whether it be a means of elegy, cultural preservation, oral history, or even a reverb, these gestures can take all forms. Multidisciplinary artist Crystal Z Campbell and Catalina Alvarez co-hosted a workshop at Fordham, inspired by found materials collected during walks in the area. The area has been remembered as San Juan Hill but was razed decades ago to build Fordham College at Lincoln Center and other developments. This night will present both of their works and continue to ask questions about how we can keep suppressed histories visible.

We’re excited to host both multidisciplinary artists to present work that approaches embodiment and performance of underknown or erased histories. Following their research in The UNDO Fellowship THE SITE OF WHISPERS and their recent show at Artists’ Space, “Ode to the Underloved”,, Crystal Z Campbell will continue to share and unpack their concept of “underloved archives” while Catalina Alvarez will share sequences from Sound Spring, a film that shares resonant overlaps and methodologies.

We’ll begin the night with a work-in-progress tentatively titled, SLICK from Campbell that they have described as, an experimental film employing history as a reverb. Focused on public secrets and sites entangled with the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and Greenwood community, performers play the city of Tulsa like an instrument, striking chords of displacement that resonate in the city of Tulsa and beyond. The work is a somatic and sonic elegy for the underloved in response to a near century of silence.

Then we will move into excerpts of a feature-in-progress from Catalina Alvarez that presents itself through eight vignettes. Sound Spring explores the history of Yellow Springs, Ohio over hundreds of years, as narrated by its residents in comical scenes. The villagers describe American history—their ancestors’ settlements after slavery and Ohio’s Trail of Tears— among other more personal details of village life.

The screening closes with a filmic relic of gentrification from close to home here in New York, voiced, edited, and sound designed by Campbell. Go-Rilla Means War (2017) features a salvaged 35mm film that Campbell found in the now demolished Black civil rights theater, The Slave Theater, a movie theater previously located at 1215 Fulton Street in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

We’ll also showcase some of the collage work that is produced in the workshop at Fordham with a short reception beginning at 7PM in the UNDO entry bar.

Come through for this night that explores both artists’ engagement with primary source material and help us ponder a question put forth by Campbell, “what stories does the body hold, and how can one tell a story without telling a story?”

Catalina and Crystal will be in attendance for a conversation following the program led by Curator Ruth Estévez,. Workshop participants behind the collage work will also be in attendance: Helen Cahill, Luisa Coutinho Gazio, Dana Ebralidze, Nicole Estelami, Matthias Lai, Nicole Miceli and Manpreet Singh. See you there!

Presented by UnionDocs, the Fordham University Visual Arts Program and the Fordham University Center for Community Engaged Learning

NOTE: This event is free for students.

Program

Go-Rilla Means War, Director: Unknown

19 mins, Editor, Sound Designer, Voice: Crystal Z Campbell, 2017

A filmic relic of gentrification. Featuring 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished Black civil rights theater in Brooklyn, Go- Rilla Means War is a parable weaving intersections of development, cultural preservation, and erasure.

Slick by Crystal Z Campbell

11 min, Work-in-progress

Crystal Z Campbell will be sharing a work-in-progress, tentatively titled SLICK––an experimental film employing history as a reverb. Focused on public secrets and sites entangled with the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and Greenwood community, performers play the city of Tulsa like an instrument, striking chords of displacement that resonate in the city of Tulsa and beyond. The work is a somatic and sonic elegy for the underloved in response to a near century of silence. What stories does the body hold, and how can one tell a story without telling a story?

This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Jerome Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Sound Spring (excerpts in-progress) by Catalina Alvarez

Excerpts from the forthcoming feature-length film Sound Spring

Unfolding in a series of eight vignettes, Sound Spring explores the history of Yellow Springs, Ohio over hundreds of years, as narrated by its residents in comical scenes: one interviewee rollerblades and reads the village’s water meters, another stands on his head in a breakdancing freeze. The villagers describe American history—their ancestors’ settlements after slavery, a friendship with Coretta Scott King, and Ohio’s Trail of Tears— among other more personal details of village life. Their wording of their recollections is imperfect, unsure—in fact they are all re-stagings of their previous audio interviews. Through interacting with their own previously recorded media, villagers uncover layers of time and storytelling.

Collages in progress

Fordham students and Lincoln Square community members will display collages they created through a workshop with Crystal Z Campbell the day before. Workshop participants include Helen Cahill, Luisa Coutinho Gazio, Dana Ebralidze, Nicole Estelami, Matthias Lai, Nicole Miceli, Manpreet Singh and Michael Nelson. See you there!

Program Duration: 60 mins

Bios

Crystal Z Campbell, is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps in the narrative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks’ “immortal” cell line, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Select honors include a 2022 Creative Capital award, Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, MacDowell, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, and Whitney ISP. Exhibitions and screenings include MOMA, Drawing Center, SFMOMA, ICA-Philadelphia, REDCAT, SculptureCenter, and Berlinale Forum Expanded. Campbell was a featured filmmaker at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar, and their film, REVOLVER, received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival. Campbell is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo and lives in New York and Oklahoma.

Catalina Alvarez collaborates with citizens and actors to incorporate physical theater and social issues into films, expanded cinema and virtual reality projects. Her films have screened at festivals including Slamdance, Fantastic Fest, New Orleans and Palm Springs, and venues such as the ICA Philadelphia, the San Diego Art Institute and the Museum of the Moving Image. She is a recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Flaherty Seminar, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Rooftop Films, Flux Factory and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Catalina grew up in a bilingual (Spanish and English) household. She currently teaches in the Visual Arts program at Fordham University, where she is head of Art & Engagement.