12:15pm | Tonight is the official public launch of the Long Beach Museum of Art’s new exhibition, Exchange and Evolution: Worldwide Video Long Beach 1974-1999. Last week, the show’s curator, Kathy Rae Huffman, spoke about the origins and significance of LBMA’s Video Art program. To further explore the significance of this exhibition, I spoke with Thomas Allen Harris, the last artist to participate in the LBMA’s Video Art program.
Harris is soft spoken, but his documentary work, which spans more than 15 years, has received international awards and accolades. He’s produced shorts, hour long programs for PBS, feature-length works, and multi-media installation pieces. I asked him to explain the origins of his exhibited work, AFRO (is just a hair style): Notes on the journey through the African diaspora.
Thomas: The piece came out of the video residency at Long Beach Museum of Art in 1999. I applied that year, I believe, with the concept and developed/edited it over the course of several month working with the equipment provided by LBMA.
The concept was to bring together three public spaces I had been involved with over the past few years. One was the Festival of Iemanja, the deity of the ocean that was brought to Brazil by former enslaved people. It has become a national holiday in which people living along the coast bring flowers as offerings each February.
The second is FESPACO, the largest and oldest African film festival on the continent. Every other year in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, West Africa, this huge multimedia event takes place that brings filmmakers and media professions from across the world to celebrate African (and African diasporic) film and video. It takes over the entire city for 1 to 2 weeks.
The third space is the AT THE BEACH event that brings together Black Gays and Lesbians from all over the world to take over a Malibu beach and celebrate pride.
These three events might seem like unlikely partners but I was a part of them, and these communities, so they are a part of me as an artist. The show brings together Super-8 images of my time and interactions with people there.
It was shot on silent Super-8 so the piece explores the way the camera is used to communicate with people across borders: The universal communication of performance. And it also speaks to ideas I was working on at the time about identity, and what connects us as African Diasporic people, and as people.
Sander: In the process of documenting, and participating in, the activities at each of these events, did you have in mind their later assemblage into a larger work?
Thomas: I didn’t know, at the time I was shooting, what forms this material would end up as, but I was seriously questioning ideas around identity and communication: How we communicate across boundaries of language and national and class and gendered identity. I frequently shoot material for my archive to be used later, in ways I might not have envisioned.
I grew up with a family who took archiving very seriously, so it was a ritual to sit before the still, Super-8, or video camera on ‘record’. It was my grandfather, Albert Sidney Johnson’s passion, and my South African dad’s, Pule Leinaeng, vocation as he did a lot of his anti-apartheid work using media in the form of radio as well as camera. So we had a sense of the importance of documenting the community, and the shifting community, over time and space. Perhaps that why both my brother, Lyle Ashton Harris, and I both are artists who use media.
I was also very interested in representing different spaces – the US, Africa, Brazil – in ways one is not usually accustomed to seeing or thinking about these places. Africa, for instance, is represented in mainstream media as such a site of trauma: Famine, AIDS, wars, etc. But in this we see another side, a side focused on a place: A poor country that is very media literate and, in so many frames, there are the latest video cameras, TV sets and news crews showing Africa documenting itself.
Sander: To that point, one challenge we face here is that the stories about Africa are woefully incomplete. For example, we heard so much about Somali pirates, but nothing about their origin: Impoverished due to huge Western fishing trawlers scooping up all the fish they had previously subsisted on.
Thomas: Exactly, and its up to us to fill in the story. That’s why, in AFRO, there are gaps in image as well as audio. In every story, every narrative, there are these holes which we fill in either with our projects, desires, our fantasies, our lived realities, our research, our experience.
Sander: This is a slight diversion, but I’m just curious: I’m descended from the Jewish diaspora. I wonder, though, if you and I have more in common with each other than with the people now living in our ancestral homelands?
Thomas: Absolutely, and that’s what this piece is about. Identity has more to do with similarity, affiliation, and empathy. Cultural contexts are so complex. In AFRO (is just a hairstyle), there are people in the frames from all walks and colors. Also, our knowledge of where we come from is so limited. Of course, all of us on this planet are cousins, like Barak Obama and Dick Cheney.
Sander: Back to the piece specifically, when you started working with the material you gathered, what did you discover that brought the pieces together?
Thomas: The ways in which the images from the different spaces and countries interacted with one another: The differences and, even more important, the similarities. I am using film language. Two images together generates a third meaning, continually evolving. Because the images are not synched up they are constantly remixing with one another. Add the sound track, which is also on its own loop, and you get a new narrative experience with each passing minute, or every time you come into the show.
Sander: What does it mean for you to be able to present this work again, so many years after you completed it?
Thomas: It is really hard to explain. It is so intimate because I know so many people in the film, and lived these experiences, but as an installation it is completely inspiring me to do more installation work.
Right after I completed and installed this show in 1999, I moved from Southern California back to New York after living here for more than 6 years. I began getting grants and commissions from television to create and exhibit my work via national and international broadcast, and film festivals. Since the move I haven’t done as many installations or performances, and the power of this piece is telling me that I need to return to the form.
Sander: What about the institutional relationship with video, specifically installation work? Is it still embraced?
Thomas: Yes, it is. I think video installation is still thriving. I do think that LBMA’s historic role of supporting the creation of new video/media work has left a hole, and that there is an opportunity for the institution to step up and reprise its historic role as a leader in the field of video, which now has also included new media work. I don’t think I would have created AFRO had I not got the residence, and all the support that entailed.
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To learn more about Thomas’ work, visit ChimpanzeeProductions.com.
To learn about his Digital Diaspora Family Reunion project, visit DDFR.tv.
To watch excerpts from his film, Marraige Equality: Byron Rushing and the Fight for Fairness, visit MarriageEqualityFilm.com.
To learn more about Exchange and Evolution, visit LBMA.org.