TFI Pop-Up Memory Lab Showcase Evening: Creative Archival Works

Archives are a largely untapped creative source, and we want to change that by offering a space that celebrates, supports, and presents works that use archives as inspiration and material in their audiovisual works.

Join us at Pen and Brush for our closing Memory Lab event on April 19th, 6:30 to 8:30 pm, to watch a selection of creative works and enjoy a short reception following the screening.

Screening Line-Up:
In Memory / For Alvin, Arlette Hernandez
In Memory / For Alvin creates a portrait of New York’s west side piers by remixing contemporary footage of the site with archival materials from the late 1970s through 1990s. The project includes excerpts for sources as disparate as podcasts and oral history recordings to documentary photography, home movies, and adult film. In addition to illustrating the site’s change, the film also serves as an homage to photographer Alvin Baltrop and the hundreds of people who lived, died, and loved at the piers.

MVMTLS, Adriane McCray
This film is an excavation of a Black collective memory with South Dallas starring as supporting character. The film’s sonic landscape is shaped around interviews that took place in the quarantine lockdown of 2020, tracing the memories of various Dallas residents on the subject of their childhoods. Its use of collected archival footage, present-day photography, home videos and aged photographs creates a tapestry that travels from moment-to-moment in stark contrast to the environment in which these conversations took place. It is a candid peak at the power of collective memory–one that yields a fragile truth and sacredness of the Black community.

Compton’s ‘22, Drew de Pinto
Three years before Stonewall, on an unknown date in August 1966, trans sex workers and drag queens rioted against police violence at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco. There was no news coverage, and the arrest records no longer exist. Decades later, trans historian Susan Stryker unearthed the history of the riot and interviewed the surviving Compton’s Queens. Compton’s ’22 creates an intergenerational conversation between these oral histories and trans artists today, using performance to imagine an interpretive archive that stands in for the absence of visual documentation. The film aims to counter the erasure and deradicalization of our history, and underscore the crucial role of intergenerational knowledge and solidarity in the ongoing struggle for queer liberation.

Survival Without Rent, Katie Heiserman & Elana Meyers
Survival Without Rent is a short archival documentary that follows a community of politically motivated New York squatters who rehabilitated abandoned city-owned properties in the 1980s and formed a vibrant community of artists and activists. Told with news clips, home videos, and oral histories, Survival Without Rent traces the history of the squatters’ movement from the 1970s, when a financial crisis in New York triggered a wave of building abandonment, to the mid-1990s when the Giuliani Administration launched an aggressive attack on lower Manhattan’s squats.