Still from “Distancia”. Pencil on paper. Drawing by Raul Ayala, 2017
When: Thursday, November 29, 2018, 6:10-7:30 pm
Where: Pupin Hall, Room 420
Through the project Hogar de la distacia (Home of Distance), Fernanda Espinosa interviewed Ecuadorian immigrants in New York and then created oral history-based digital memory containers in collaboration with artists using visual and sound compositions.
By using oral history as a primary source and medium for the construction of these “Memory Transmission Containers,” Espinosa’s creative exploration challenges and expands traditional Western ideas of the archive. Her work asks how oral history can have a broader reach and, simultaneously, a more focused transmission through asking questions like: What might posterity mean for participants, considering their specific cultural history and present experience? How could narrators more easily access and even make use of the recording? And, can preservation happen through circulation?
Fernanda Espinosa is an oral historian and cultural organizer based in New York and Quito. She has been generating, listening to, and interpreting oral histories to inform creative public interventions that aspire to act as platforms for resistance and dialogue.
Fernanda holds a degree in Oral History from Columbia University, where her thesis was awarded the 2018 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. She is the co-founder and coordinator of Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero (CC 1/19), an ongoing art and oral history collaboration with visual artists. She is a former member and co-founder of People’s Collective Arts/Colectivo de Arte Popular and is currently the Associate Manager of StoryCorps’ Mobile Tour program.
Blog posts by current OHMA students about this event:
Art and Art-making: The Meticulous Presence of the Encounter
So the People and the Fox Collaborated...
Talking Knots: Decolonizing Oral History through Alternative Methods of Memory Transmission