Jun 27, 2025 at 10:00 am – Jun 29, 2025 at 5:00 pm
Images in Captivity:
Looking at the Living World
With Jessica Sarah Rinland, Sarah J Christman, Ilisa Barbash & Jorge Otero-Pailos
What are our inherited methods of observation and conservation, and how do they shape our understanding of shared histories and spaces?
Artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland (Monólogo Collectivo, 2025) invites us to consider the traditional frameworks for documenting and containing knowledge of our environment across this 3-day workshop. We’ll be taking a closer look at the rich and contested traditions of animal and nature documentary, scrutinizing the position of the documentarian, researcher and conservator within historical preservation practices: , as innovators, agents or critics.
We’ll take a hands-on approach to interrogating various strategies for interpreting the environments that surround us. We will critically compare ecological and museological conservation, and consider how this comparison might reshape documentary methodology— investigating how images, both moving and still, protect, distort or confine our understanding of the natural world.
We’re excited to bring together a diverse group of thinkers, artists and filmmakers as we ask questions like:
What do the documentarian and the conservator have in common, what techniques, methods and technologies do they share?
What do our systems for observing nature and preserving objects reveal about how we structure power and narrativize history?
Is preservation an act of care – or can it perpetuate past violences?
And how might collaboration and interdisciplinary knowledge-building support new methodologies that address historical injustices and contribute to reparative practices?
We’ll begin with Jessica Rinland’s work looking at her recent film and exhibition, and her inquiry into the history and usages of camera traps in wildlife documentation, followed by Sarah J Christman, whose work focuses on the intersections between people, technology and the natural world. We’ll head to Ridgewood Reservoir with Jessica for a closer look at applying method to field work. Then we’ll be joined by experimental preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos who will expand on his artistic practice, sitting at the crossroads of architecture, preservation and aesthetics. Finally, filmmaker and visual anthropologist Ilisa Barbash will take us on a journey through her work in repatriation and ethical stewardship.
Join us for three days to explore these thorny questions at the center of nonfiction practices with this stellar lineup of guest speakers!
Details
Open to everyone, though the workshop setting is best suited for filmmakers, film producers, journalists, curators and media artists.
Give us an idea of who you are and why you are coming. When you register you will be asked for a short statement of interest that should briefly describe your experience and a film project (it would be great if you have a project in progress that you would present to the group during the work-in-progress critique sessions), plus a bio. There’s a spot for a link to a work sample (and CV, which would also be nice, but is not required).
$350 early bird registration ends on June 17, 2025.
$375 regular registration.
The deposit is non-refundable. Should you need to cancel, you’ll receive half of your registration fee back until June 17. After June 17, the fee is non-refundable.
In order to keep costs down, this workshop is a BYOL, i.e. bring your own laptop. Students must be fully proficient using and operating their computers.
To register for a workshop, students must pay in full via card, check, or cash . After the early bird registration deadline of June 17, course fees are not refundable or transferable and any withdrawals or deadlines will result in the full cost of the class being forfeit. There will be no exceptions. To withdraw from a course please email info-at-uniondocs.org.
In the event that a workshop does not receive sufficient enrollment, it may be canceled. Students will be notified at least 48 hours prior to the start of a cancelled workshop and will be refunded within 5 business days. If we reschedule a workshop to another date, students are also entitled to a full refund. UnionDocs reserves the right to change instructors without prior notification, and to change class location and meeting times by up to an hour with 48 hours prior notice.
Please note: Participants are accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Schedule
Friday, June 27th
10:00am – 10:30am Welcome & intros
10:30am – 12:30pm Intro session with Jessica Sarah Rinland
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Sarah J Christman
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with LEAD additional exercises / discussion
7:30pm – EYES THAT SHINE AT NIGHT, an artist presentation by Jessica Sarah Rinland
Saturday, June 28th
10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case studies
10:30am – 4:00pm Field trip to Ridgewood Reservoir with Jessica Sarah Rinland and NYC H2O
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with LEAD, additional exercises / discussion
Sunday, June 29th
10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.
10:30am – 12:30pm Session with Jorge Otero-Pailos
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Ilisa Barbash
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with LEAD, additional exercises / discussion
Each day follows this general structure, with some minor variations and substitutions:
Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.
Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique
Share / Discussion / Exercise
Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique
Workshop Exercise + Critique
Argentine-British artist filmmaker, Jessica Sarah Rinland is a recipient of numerous prizes including Best International Film at Cinéma du Réel, and Documenta Madrid for COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUE, Special Mention at Locarno Film Festival for THOSE THAT, AT A DISTANCE, RESEMBLE ANOTHER, and MIT’s Schnitzer prize for excellence in the arts.
Her most recent solo exhibition was at Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain, subsequently traveling to Katoenhuis, Rotterdam. Previous exhibitions include University of Tennessee’s Downtown Gallery, Southwark Park Galleries, Taipei Biennial, Somerset House and New Contemporaries. She has had retrospectives of her films at Flaherty Film Seminar, Anthology Film Archives, Open City Documentary Film Festival, Doc’s Kingdom, London Short Film Festival, among others.
She has participated in residencies including Film Studies Center at Harvard University, Somerset House Studios, MacDowell, and Ikusmira Berriak. Her films are held at the British Film Institute.
Sarah J Christman is a New York City based filmmaker whose films explore the intersections between people, technology and the natural world.
Her work has screened widely, including the Toronto International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, MASS MoCA, AFI and the Los Angeles Film Forum. She received the New Visions Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival for her debut film Dear Bill Gates and Jury Awards from the Ann Arbor Film Festival for Gowanus Canal and As Above, So Below. Her feature film Swarm Season (2019) screened at festivals including CPH:DOX, Sheffield DocFest, Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real and RIDM. It was nominated for Best Debut Feature by Cinema Eye Honors, and is distributed by Grasshopper Film and MUBI.
Christman received her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and her BA in Art History and Visual Art from Oberlin College. She is a Professor of Film at Brooklyn College / CUNY.
Ilisa Barbash is Curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology where she makes films, writes books and curates exhibitions about photography. She made the films In and Out of Africa (1992), about authenticity and taste in the transnational African art trade, and Sweetgrass (2009), a sensory ethnographic film about the American West, both with Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Sweetgrass was nominated for an Independent Spirit Best Feature Documentary and the Independent Spirit Aveeno Truer than Fiction Award; Cinema Eye First Feature Documentary Award; IDA Best Documentary Feature Award; Gotham Best Documentary Award and received the Audience Award at Punto de Vista; Artistic Excellence Award, Big Sky Film Festival, MT; Best International Doc, Astra Film Festival, Romania. Her book, Where the Roads All End (Peabody Museum Press 2015) about western representation of the Ju/’hoansi (San) in 1950s Namibia, was awarded the John Collier, Jr. Award for Visual Excellence in the Use of Still Photography by the Society for Visual Anthropology. She co-edited the To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes (Aperture/Peabody Museum Press 2020), which won the 2020 Rencontres d’Arles, Best Historical Photographic Book Award.
Jorge Otero-Pailos is an American-Spanish artist, preservation architect, scholar, and educator renowned for pioneering experimental preservation practices. He employs artistic methods, informed by advanced technologies, materials research, and interdisciplinary collaborations to expand the range of objects that are valued as cultural heritage, and to develop new ways of caring for those objects. His wide-ranging artistic practice finds expression through materials like airborne atmospheric dusts, smells, sounds, and architectural fragments.
His series “The Ethics of Dust” turned experimental preservation cleaning techniques into a signature aesthetic, creating large scale latex casts from the dust and pollution residues found on landmarked monuments. His practice highlights how the dusts sedimented on buildings function as repositories of previously unexamined environmental histories and collective memories.
His works have been commissioned by and exhibited at major heritage sites, museums, foundations, and biennials, including Artangel’s public art commission at the UK Parliament, the Chicago Architecture Biennale (2017), Venice Art Biennale (2009), V&A Museum, Louis Vuitton Galerie Museum, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, SFMoMA, Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Frieze London, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts among others. He is the recipient of a 2021-22 American Academy in Rome Residency in the visual arts.
