Part of the 2024-25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series:
You Didn't See Nothin with Yohance Lacour and Sarah Geis [Virtual Event]
The first event of ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping feature Yohance Lacour and Sarah Geis, who respectively hosted and produced the Pulitzer Prize-winning audio documentary series You Didn’t See Nothin. The limited series investigates a 25-year-old hate crime, the beating of Lenard Clark in a white neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago in 1998. The series deftly weaves memoir and investigative reporting, recontextualizing and reexamining the impact of this moment on a community and on the life of Lacour himself. This event will feature a presentation by Lacour and Geis on the process of creating this work, followed by a Q and A with the audience.
Sarah Geis is a long-time audio editor, producer, and educator who is influenced by oral history, documentary theater, and Lynda Barry.
She likes experimenting with form, fighting for moments of poetry, and sneaking jokes into serious places. At the Invisible Institute, she was the story editor of the podcast Somebody, which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and a co-creator of the podcast You Didn't See Nothin, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody. She runs the project Audio Playground, a home for high-risk, low-stakes audio experiments, teaches at Northwestern and the University of Chicago, and is a former artistic director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival.
Yohance Lacour is a journalist with the Invisible Institute’s Audio Team and Wrongful Conviction Unit. He hosted the podcast You Didn’t See Nothin, which won the 2024 Peabody and Pulitzer Prize. At Storycatchers Theatre, he facilitates podcasting workshops for system-impacted youth. He also runs YJL, the luxury sneaker label, and has artwork in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Dubuque Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s African American Museum of History and Culture.
2024-25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series:
In this series, we highlight the work of artists, scholars, and knowledge-keepers whose works attend to what Toni Morrison describes as the “pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” (Morrison 2019) The reparative labor of re-memory invites us to recognize the ways that we are intimately bound up with undocumented or under-documented histories and the urgent need for "reconstituting and recollecting a usable past.” Kenyan author and scholar Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, whose work seeks to redress the historical amnesia and “dismemberment” of the colonial enterprise, sees memory as “the site of dreams, and of desire, is thus crucial to the construction of our being.”
From Yohance Lacour, whose audio documentary work You Didn’t See Nothin deftly weaves memoir and investigative reporting, recontextualizing and reexamining the impact of a hate crime on the south side of Chicago and on the life of Lacour himself, to documentary filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes, whose films enact multiple forms of participatory authorship to create narratives that emerge as a third space wherein the hidden poetry of marginalized communities can flourish; to scholar Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis takes the Maya creation story, The Popol Vuh, and explores its history and relevance in contemporary moments of crisis,; to Renata Cherlise, writer, artist, and founder of Black Archives, a “gathering place for Black memory and imaginations,” we will engage in conversations on listening, authorship, and knowledge-keeping. As Thiong'o asserts, “Creative imagination is one of the greatest of re-membering practices.”
Events will take place on Thursday evenings (ET) from 6-7:00PM and will either be virtual or in-person.