Simone Lucas & Aimee Louw

Feminist Media Studio 5 à 7 presentation series:

Simone Lucas (Concordia University, M.A. Student in Media Studies):
“So You Know I Think About You Every Day: A Study of E-Mail Correspondence and Friendship Through Video Art”

This project is a cinematographic investigation of women’s friendship and e-mail correspondence. I use personal e-mails exchanged with a friend over the summer of 2009 as a point of departure for an experimental essay film. In the film, two friends meet within the digital realm of the e-mail. In parallel, they dance through the dreamscape of an abandoned construction site. They perform for each other in movement and in writing as a way to foster intimate friendship across geographical distance. Through these performances, they discover the power of watching and being watched by a friend.

The video will form the basis of a theoretical text on e-mailing as a vehicle for both intimacy and self-expression in friendship. Drawing from Trinh-T. Minh Ha’s experimental film Night Passage and its companion book D-Passage: The Digital Way, I will explore the relationship between video art and feminist media theory. I intend to develop theory that is grounded in the process of filmmaking.

Aimee Louw (Concordia University, M.A. Student in Media Studies):
“Settling for Accessibility: Stories of Accessibility and Settler Colonialism through Video Production in two Canadian Cities”

Accessibility advocacy is necessarily place-based, addressing systemic barriers to public engagement because of physical and social spaces. By being historically and culturally excluded from public spaces due to these barriers and discriminatory attitudes and practices, people with disabilities are often in the position of needing to assert their right to space for themselves in literal ways (on paths and sidewalks, on transit, in daily navigation of institutions).

The videos presented for feedback sit at the intersection of Critical Disability Studies (CDS), Indigenous Studies (IS), and Mobility Studies (MS), looking at the tension between calls from disability justice activists for increased access to public spaces, and title (right) to unceded territory by Indigenous peoples (Garland-Thomson, 2011, Hickey, 2014). The first, Bodies of Knowledge, is an autoethnographic video poem exploring the filmmaker’s relationship to landscape, climate change, and personal history, as a wheelchair user enjoying Vancouver’s easily accessible sea wall paths. The second, My Shoreline, is at once an expose into an element of transit discrimination in Montreal, Quebec, and a meditation on the desires and pleasures of being in, and near water.