Kelly Gallagher, Filmmaker, Curator, and Assistant Professor of Film at Syracuse University, NY, with Miranda July, Acclaimed Filmmaker, Artist, and Writer, Los Angeles, CA

Introduction by C. Jacqueline Wood, FotoFocus Guest Curator and The Mini Microcinema Director, Cincinnati, OH

Miranda July in conversation with Kelly Gallagher to discuss her Joanie 4 Jackie Archive.

In 1995, Miranda July dropped out of college, moved to Portland, Oregon, and typed up a pamphlet that she imagined would be the start of a revolution of girls and women making movies and sharing them with each other. The pamphlet said: “A challenge and a promise: Lady, you send me your movie and I’ll send you the latest Big Miss Moviola Chainletter Tape.”

Joanie 4 Jackie (aka Big Miss Moviola) was an underground film network for girls and women, formed in 1995. For more than ten years women sent their movies to Joanie 4 Jackie and received a “Chainletter” tape in return — their movie compiled with nine others. In a pre-YouTube world, this was one-way women could see each other’s work and know they weren’t alone.  The project inspired girls to make movies for the first time, circulated work by seasoned artists and connected women across the country through screenings and booklets of letters that arrived with each videotape. By the time the project had run its course the work of over 200 filmmakers was distributed through 22 compilation tapes, and Joanie 4 Jackie had exhibited movies all over the world, from punk clubs to the Museum of Modern Art.

In January 2017 The Getty Research Institute announced the acquisition of the complete Joanie 4 Jackie archives. Twenty-seven boxes of tapes, posters, letters, embarrassing notes, to-do lists, and grandiose plans will be made available to researchers and preserved for all time in a feminist and queer context, alongside the archives of artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Carolee Schneemann.

Vanguard composer and pianist Vijay Iyer and Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole perform the powerful interdisciplinary collaboration Blind Spot at Cincinnati’s historic Memorial Hall. Cole’s striking photography and spoken words are accompanied by a live score performed by Iyer’s adept trio—Okkyung Lee (cello), Patricia Brennan (vibes and marimba), Stephan Crump (bass)—for a musical investigation of humanity’s voluntary blindness to tragedy and injustice throughout history.

Introduction by Drew Klein, FotoFocus Guest Curator and Contemporary Arts Center Performing Arts Director, Cincinnati, OH

The present seems to flow ceaselessly through the tiny sliver of memory nature allotted us—memories we try to hold onto (if only for a moment) in their vast immensity. It is this ineptness of memory, the apparent smallness of it, that has motivated people throughout history to try and capture it with more permanent and capable mediums. We attempt to hold on to the artifacts of experience by inscribing them on everything around us—on cave walls, stone tablets, animal hides, trees, electrical currents, even the binary spins of electrons themselves.

In Place of Forgetting is an interactive multi-channel audio-visual installation exploring the contemporary overabundance of memory and its impact on the quality of the experiences we attempt to remember. With each repost, recontextualization, reiteration, or translation, a connection to the original moment is further obscured. Viewers traverse this sense of iterative loss through their physical interactions, shaping their experience by sifting through and reassembling text and images sourced from an archive of historical Cincinnati postcards collected by Mark Rohling, Senior Exhibition Designer/Chief Preparator at the Taft Museum of Art. By influencing which fragments of the audio archive are amplified through their action, the visitors evoke new and unique relationships between them, continuously transforming their context. One box tells a story, while its companions speak in counterpoint and a pair on the side hold a conversation. A trio sing in harmony together, their voices echoing the marks of handwriting scribed on the back of each postcard.

Intermedio also presents Mid-Day Ghost, a collaborative composition combining spoken word, stories, and experimental vocal sounds with interactive multichannel audio, performed by multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Jennifer Simone and saxophonist Om Srivastava. Through interactions with the installation In Place of Forgetting, Mid-Day Ghost explores the ephemerality of our contemporary experiences and how they are shaped by memories of the past—what we keep and what we leave behind.

Download the INTERMEDIO: In Place of Forgetting Gallery Guide as a PDF.

In this divided era, where world powers openly threaten to unleash enormous nuclear arsenals, Nuclear Fallout: The Bomb in Three Archives excavates the collective memory of the effects and aftermath of nuclear war. This interdisciplinary collaboration re-examines archival slides, photographs, 16mm films, objects, and documents from three markedly different archives: the U.S. National Archives military training films, multimedia materials from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Memorial Collection of the Wilmington College Peace Resource Center, and the ideologically sanitized exhibits of the National Museum of the United States Air Force, which spotlight Bocks Car—the B-29 bomber that dropped the plutonium Fat Man bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. Embedded in the project are two renowned Japanese-American artists Kei Ito and Migiwa Orimo, working within the three archives to create installations responding to the conceptual “scotomas,” gaps, blurrings, and erasures that exist in our faded recollections of these events in history. Through this collaboration, Nuclear Fallout asks its audiences to critically consider the way war is curated in our cultural telling—asking who creates the narrative, whose stories are missing, and who is no longer alive to tell it.

Nuclear Fallout is organized by Jennifer Wenker, curator and creative director of the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College; Tanya Maus (Ph.D., Japanese History), director of the Peace Resource Center; Migiwa Orimo, four-time recipient of the OAC Individual Excellence Award; Charles Fairbanks, Guggenheim fellow, award-winning filmmaker, and Assistant Professor of Media Art at Antioch College; and the students critically engaged in collaboration with these academic mentors.

First appearing on earth in 2012, the Forealism Tribe hails from another dimension. This group of inter-dimensional travelers are tourists of earth and observers of the human condition. Functioning as quasi-anthropologists, they travel earth to seek out, discover, view, participate in, and learn from human activities, rituals, events, and environments. Throughout their existence, the Forealisms and the humans that they have befriended have documented their travels, appearances, and adventures in both photographs and video.

For the first time anywhere in the universe, The Forealism Files presents their collected documents and artifacts in an anthropological museum display that includes large-format “portrait” photographs of key characters; a selection of images documenting interactions and performances; edited video footage of Forealism activities; rotating displays of the character suits; live performances; and lectures.

Forealisms have visited and documented Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany; Skulptur Projekte, Münster, Germany; Art Basel, Miami Beach 2016; Houston, Texas; St. Louis, Missouri; numerous locations around Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky; and other locations in and outside the galaxy.

Raquel André is a collector of rare things. 

In Lisbon, Ponta Delgada, Rio de Janeiro, Loulé, Minde, Paredes de Coura, Sever do Vouga, Ovar, Manaus, and Barreiro, she has collected content from close to 150 encounters. People of all nationalities, genders, and ages have accepted the invitation to meet her at someone’s flat for an hour to construct a fictional intimacy to be captured in memory and photographs. The photographs and details of these encounters are the contents of a performance that tells a story about what this collection of relationships may mean. Just what are we looking for when we meet someone? In the age of e-mail, Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, and Grinder, we have all become experts at faking intimacy. We post what we eat, who we kiss, where we go, what we’re thinking and reading, what we like and dislike—all translated into views, likes, and comments.

 Raquel’s collection is the results of an obsessive fascination with the terabytes of information that exist in each minuscule movement of another person. It is a reflection on intimacy that is explored one-to-one and amplified for the stage, all real and all fake. Each time the door opens for a new lover, Raquel André dives into an abyss that is the other, and reality and fiction merge. Each encounter is real. The flirtation is real. The intimacy may feel more real than fiction. And Raquel, the obsessive collector, holds on to the moments of each meeting, the rare objects of her peculiar collection, ephemeral and infinite.

Collection of Lovers first premiered in 2015 at the studio theater of the D.Maria II National Theater in Lisbon (Portugal) in co-production with TEMPO Arts Festival in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).