Program 7:00p

Offsite
Microscope Gallery
525 W 29th St 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001

UnionDocs is delighted to come together with Microscope Gallery & Fordham University to welcome the brilliant Christopher Harris to NYC  for a multi-media presentation of an upcoming film and art project and Harris’s first autobiographical work, “God Bless the Child.” The event will take place in person and online.

In “God Bless the Child,” Harris draws directly from his infancy and experience as a foster child. Combining photos, records, and other materials from his personal archives with 16mm film footage he recently shot in Senegal, Harris situates “the carcerality of the social welfare state and child services in relation to Black childhood in the US” within the broader context of the transatlantic slave trade and the French Catholic Church’s colonization of West Africa and the Americas. His hometown of St. Louis, MO and Saint-Louis, Senegal are presented as fraternal colonized twin cities.

Harris says: “I was born on Easter Sunday to Mary Ellen Harris, a Catholic woman who gave me the Greek derived name Christopher, which means “bearing Christ.” I was still a newborn when the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of Saint-Louis, MO became my legal guardian. I lived in a foster home for the first 16 years of my life, spending 8th grade in a Catholic boarding school and junior and senior year of high school in a Catholic group home for boys run by Jesuit priests. In between the foster home and the group home, I spent a few nights in juvenile detention because I had nowhere else to go.”

The archival materials — which include, among many others, records about Harris from the Archdiocese of Saint-Louis, photos of his birth and foster mothers, and a newspaper profile of him as a child available for adoption placed just above an ad for Lane Bryant shoes and other products — will eventually be edited into an experimental essay film along with additional footage Harris will soon be shooting in his hometown and in Paris.

The presentation is followed by an open conversation and Q&A with the audience.

A special video installation/performance by Fordham professor Catalina Alvarez’s students featuring interviews, field recordings, and images of historical documents related to the destruction of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and Lincoln Square community in the 1950s to make way for Lincoln Center, Fordham College, and other developments will precede the event. Interviewees include Michael Nelson, Neal Matticks, Sandra Chestnut, Harold Thomas and Marguerite Nelson. Student artists include: Nikki Estelami, Reed Maruyama, Matthias Lai, Dana Ebralidze, Nicole Miceli, Manpreet Singh, Luisa Gazio, Helen Cahill, Charlotte Marsden, Fiona Nunn, Johnny Morocho, Kelly Stanton, Lily Sood, & Vanessa Hernandez.

This program is being supported by a Fordham University Faculty Challenge Grant and Interdisciplinary Research Grant, as well as funding from Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning. It’s a collaborative effort with Fordham University’s Visual Arts – Art and Engagement program, and UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art.

Program

God Bless the Child by Christopher Harris

A multi-media presentation

In “God Bless the Child,” the artist’s first autobiographical work, Harris draws directly from his infancy and experience as a foster child. Combining photos, records, and other materials from his personal archives with 16mm film footage he recently shot in Senegal, Harris situates “the carcerality of the social welfare state and child services in relation to Black childhood in the US” within the broader context of the transatlantic slave trade and the French Catholic Church’s colonization of West Africa and the Americas. His hometown of St. Louis, MO and Saint-Louis, Senegal are presented as fraternal colonized twin cities.

Bios

Christopher Harris makes experimental films and video installations informed by Motown, P-Funk, bebop, free jazz and beyond. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video among other strategies. Like his production techniques, his influences — among them Black literature, avant-garde structuralist film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music—are eclectic. Working through incongruity and slippages, between sound and image, between past, present and future, and between absence and presence, his films, like the music from which they take inspiration, embodies the existential complexities and paradoxes of racialized identity in the U.S.

His films have appeared widely at festivals, museums and cinematheques, including an upcoming solo screening at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Previous screenings include solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Locarno Film Festival, and Arsenal Berlin, a two-person screening with Su Friedrich at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and group screenings at the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Harris is the recipient of the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video, a 2015 Creative Capital Award and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe, and Chrysalis. He currently lives in Iowa where he is the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa.

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.