We are thrilled to announce our Visiting Artists for Cycle 2 of the national SPACES Artist in Residence program: filmmakers, teachers, and multi-platform storytellers Michael Kuetemeyer and Anula Shetty. Anula and Michael are award-winning media artists whose work is an evolving combination of interactive documentary film and socially engaged participatory media. Based in Philadelphia, their projects have included traveling around the United States in a school bus to teach media making and a transmedia film project mapping Pearl Street with the men of the Sunday Breakfast Rescue mission. Hailing from Bombay and Philadelphia originally, Anula and Michael are now based in Fishtown. Starting with the question “How does change happen in a neighborhood?” Anula and Michael will work alongside a core group of neighborhood artists to collect and create local stories about home, civic engagement, and formal/informal community leadership — and then amplify those stories to effect change. The team will produce a web series about the neighborhood, build a geolocative app that connects resident stories to ongoing civic initiatives, and train community members as media makers and teachers themselves.
Anula and Michael will kick off their residency on August 1. Keep an eye out for our first open house and SPACES film screenings, concerts, and media classes open to the public later in the summer!
Read on for our interview with Anula and Mike about their work and inspiration.
Where are you from? How did you come to Philly?
Anula: I’m originally from Bombay and came to Philly to study filmmaking at Temple U.
Mike: I grew up in Philadelphia and have lived in many neighborhoods in the city.
What was the artistic background of your childhoods/youth?
Anula: My dad would tell us stories from Indian mythology and I remember waiting eagerly every night for the next installment of the story. There was very little television programming when I was growing up, so my sister and I would spend all our free time writing stories, creating imaginary worlds and putting on plays with kids in our apartment building.
Mike: Both my parents were active in the arts. My father studied filmmaking and has been an electronic musician for most of his life. My mother had been very active in the Community Education Center in Poweltown, where she taught woodworking and ran a film series. My childhood years were spent learning pottery and screen printing at the CEC.
Mike, how did you come to filmmaking? What is powerful/interesting to you about filmmaking as a medium? Who are some of your filmmaking inspirations?
I have always been captivated by filmʻs ability to be both a physical/chemical/electronic record of reality as well as a creative/expressive form of communication. I began my college career in the field of Meteorology. Visual patterns in clouds and maps are beautiful and awe inspiring in their movements and manifestations but are also revealing about the processes at work when studied. I am also creatively sustained by filmmaking as it involves a dance of images, sounds and time. The collaborative nature of filmmaking is an amazing experience. Combining together the voices and expressions of a group of artists and community members is a powerful experience that can have a significant and lasting impact.
Anula, you are a storyteller and theater artist as well as a filmmaker. Tell us how you came to find those media. Why is storytelling so important to you?
What fascinates me about storytelling is the ability to share an experience and to create a connection with the audience. I was drawn to filmmaking by the early works of the Indian film director Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Australian filmmaker Peter Weir. In film school I discovered that there were many ways to tell stories through documentary and experimental forms and became interested in exploring the relationship between form and content. After I took a theater workshop in 2001, I was intrigued by the immediacy and direct connection to a live audience that theater provides. I now try to bring the playfulness and spontaneity of theater to my filmmaking practice and incorporate improv games and techniques in my filmmaking residencies.
When did you first begin to collaborate? What’s your collaboration style?
Our first collaboration was a documentary Kamaka’eha Aching Eye, a poetic film about six native Hawaiians and their relationship to Hawaii’s cultural, geological and political history. In the process of making the film, we discovered that by combining our different perspectives and creative visions, we were able to create a much more layered and complex work. Our current work is an evolving combination of experimental documentary film and socially engaged participatory media. Collaboration is key in our artistic practice and our enjoyment of the art-making process. We thrive on the inspiration provided by other artists. One of the most exciting aspects of our work has been our interactions with fellow artists and the synergy of ideas our collaboration facilitates. In 1992, Michael co-founded Termite TV Collective, an artist-run media arts collective. In the article, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art”, art critic Manny Farber describes White Elephant Art as art that “strives for perfection, an expensive hunk that sucks in time, money, resources and that sits heavily over the talent of every artist.” On the other hand, he suggests, “Termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss-art, moves always forward, eating its own boundaries and leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” This was the inspiration for the name Termite TV Collective – emphasizing exploration, risk-taking and innovation.
You’ve done community storytelling projects in the past. Can you tell us about traveling across the country collecting stories?
For Termite Tv’s “Living Documentary’ Project, we traveled across the country in a school bus for 6 months, filming and interviewing people along the way. In an attempt to have a connection with different communities in a short period of time, one of the collective members, Dorothea Braemer came up with the idea of the 5 minute life story. We would set up a tent at local farmer’s markets, libraries, and sometimes, when our bus broke down - on the side of the highway. It created a festive atmosphere and through this project we collected over 400 life stories of people from across the country.
How do you uniquely understand the role of an artist in residence?
Our passion lies in working with communities to create art works that explore local stories and histories and that affect the community in a deep and meaningful way. As artists in residence, we see ourselves as catalysts and facilitators, injecting inspiration, making people aware of their own artistic potential and the potential of media as a tool to create change in our world.
The kind of art-making we like best is collaborative, the result of a collective effort of all participants who bring their creative imaginations and energies to the process. We are interested in what Pablo Helguera, in his book Education for Socially Engaged Art, calls a “Collaborative Participation Model.” As we engaged in the process of creating our recent project Time Lens, we had to gather information about what the community wanted, but often participants with diverse needs and interests voiced competing ideas. How could we develop the structure and content of the final art work to adequately respond to all participants? We had to establish a relationship of openness and trust, while also striving to create a work that we felt expressed our own vision for the project. These complex challenges manifested themselves in real-time. These are the core challenges of participatory, community art-making, whereby our work becomes a kind of artistic politics. Our goal necessarily becomes the origination of new, fulfilling modes of collaborative expression to meet the needs of the individuals in the community while yielding a product that we feel is a strong representation of our own talents.
What drew you to apply to SPACES?
The Village of the Arts and Humanities is an organization whose vitality and impact we have always admired. When we heard of the SPACES program, we were excited by the opportunity to be part of the Village community and the possibilities of the work we could create here.
On our tour of the three block area of the Village, we were impressed by the richness of the history behind the different parks and murals and the passion with which Village staff imparted these evocative stories. Particularly moving was the story of late community resident and staff member “Big Man” Maxton’s commemorative stoop. We were also inspired by the PhillyEarth urban farm and the Village’s engagement in locally grown food and permaculture, of creating a foundation and planting seeds for a sustainable future. The tour emphasized for us the importance of art, sustainability, community involvement and engagement in the transformation of the inner city urban landscape.
Why are you, personally as individuals, drawn to geolocative storytelling? What can it do that other forms cannot? Why is it important today – to you, and to others?
In our geolocative projects, we create works that explore actual urban spaces through multiple layers of time and community stories. We want to bring people to specific locations to participate in a transformative experience of that space, to infuse media art into the geographical landscape. We are in a unique era where media can be used to explore specific locations in their multi-temporal forms. Virtual reality can bring an immersive representation of a location to a remote viewer. Augmented reality can add layers of information to the current location the viewer is in. Both have the ability to engage a viewer in a way that produces an impact on the future of that location. Linking media from various time periods to a location can produce what we are calling a ‘time lens’. This is an ability to “see” details in the ongoing evolution of specific locations and the various potential future states that can manifest as a result of our collective social choices.
Our recent project Time Lens (created as part of Asian Arts Initiative’s Social practice Lab) is an interactive art project and a mobile app featuring a series of immersive panoramas documenting the rapid gentrification and stories of the homeless community in the Chinatown North/Callowhill neighborhood in Philadelphia. Users can download the app on their mobile devices and follow along in the actual location, experiencing both the past and the present and the virtual and physical all at the same time.
Film scholars Patricia Zimmermann and filmmaker Helen De Michiel have coined the term “Open Space Documentary” to describe participatory media experiments that are proliferating across rapidly evolving distribution platforms and how cinema-as-an-art‐form is radically undergoing transformation. They reveal how technological interfaces like Mobile devices, apps, and social media are liberating artists to explore new ways to frame community activities as creative practice and to weave them into a larger social fabric of history and memory. It is thrilling to be in the company of artists who are exploring new ways of storytelling through apps and new technologies.
What impact do you hope to have in the residency? What impact on your own lives and work do you hope it will have?
We are strong believers in the transformative power of art – the power to inspire, to move people to action and to create change. We have many exciting ideas for the residency and are looking forward to learning more about the neighborhood and creating an App and a web series with the Village community. Sustainability has become a key part of our practice and at every stage of the residency we want to stress green, sustainable filmmaking. We will use solar panels to charge camera batteries and equipment and are working on strategies to make this an entirely solar powered art project. Throughout the residency we will share technical skills of filmmaking, photography, interviewing and interactive authoring. Through collaborative workshops and by sharing our planning and work process with neighborhood artists, we also hope to share leadership, collaboration and team building skills.
You’ll be living at the village with your young family. How do your kids feel about the move?
Our kids (9 and 6 years old) have accompanied and helped us on many of our artistic endeavors. We love being able to expose them to new experiences. They are curious about the Village community and excited about embarking on yet another adventure!
How do you plan to introduce yourselves to the neighborhood? How can people from other neighborhoods participate?
The two activities we plan to begin our residency with are 1) a regular outdoor screening series of socially engaged films created in other neighborhoods, combined with discussions on what ideas resonate for the Village community and 2) Collaborating with a team of neighborhood filmmakers to interview residents and passersby, inviting them to share a story about the neighborhood, or a selected theme that concerns the community. We will set up shoots at strategic locations asking community residents what this place was like in the past, what they would like to see happen, what can this place become.
Since you’ve been prepping with the Village, what are you most excited about? Any spots, stories, people that stand out?
The storefront on Germantown Avenue is a great opportunity to have an on-going presence in the neighborhood. We hope to have a solar powered story booth/charging station set up there for the community to use. The Village neighborhood has so many amazing individuals committed to creating change — we are both humbled and inspired by their stories and can’t wait to start collaborating with them.
What an incredible, innovative, and uplifting program! We love work like this and are excited that it’s happening right here in Philadelphia. #togetherwerise
