Storytelling

Lòpital Pa Prizon Collaboration

An ongoing research-activist, oral history, and archival intervention into the problem of clinical imprisonment in global public health, especially in the context of NGO hospitals in Haiti. This includes the interactive website, www.birthresistance.com, envisioned as a multilingual platform for promoting discussion, sharing research, and amplifying patient stories and strategies. It features full conversations with experts on the practice including mothers, journalists, academics, and activists.

Hospital Detention Audio Documentary: Akouchman ak Rezistans | Birth & Resistance

Combining creative ethnographic storytelling, birth stories, and analytic reflection, these English and Haitian Creole audio documentaries understand the emergence of “hospital-prisons” and medical detention in Haiti and around the world. It focuses on two Haitian mothers—Likna and Naomi—and their experiences of birthing in Euro-American mission hospitals where they were then imprisoned for months. Locked inside with their infants, and provided neither food, water, or toiletries, these hospitals leveraged Naomi, Likna, and their companions as corporeal collateral to force families and communities to pay outstanding debts for obstetric surgeries.

What is hospital detention and what are its histories? What kind of silences are being kept around medical detention? How are these silences related to deeper histories of  racial capitalism, medicine, and its particularly intense manipulations of black motherhood and black reproduction? And how have mothers like Likna and Naomi, healthcare workers like Guerlande, and other journalists from around the world been challenging it?

Experimental Glimpses: Jè Kle: (In a Vision)

In Sou Lapwen, on the outskirts of Arcahaie, Haiti, the term “travay” [work] is applied to diverse magical as well as mundane acts. This multimodal project uses film and photographic essay to explore travay as a nexus of social practices for transforming the political relations among humans, other beings, and landscapes in Haitian Vodou. The film layers together coinciding instances of travay, drawing from documentary film clips of everyday labors, songs for the lwa [invisible ancestral beings] of Haitian Vodou, ambient noise, rhythmic motions, and recreated dream imagery that illustrate how travay shapes lived bodies in relation to one another and a vibrating and energetic world. In lieu of generating meaning through explanatory narration, the co-directors (an anthropologist and a moto-taxi driver) bring together a variety of lived moments of travay in order to illustrate a concept that is at once sensual, interpretive, lived, and abstract.

Art + Sacred Philadelphia

Working with UPENN Graduate Students and curator-artist-choreographer Reggie Wilson to audio-visually document a series of performances that explored religion, movement, race and the body, with a focus on the African American religious experience and the specific context of Philadelphia’s historic sacred spaces. Curated by Reggie Wilson, “Grounds that Shout: and others merely shaking…” included performances by Philadelphia-based artists at religious sites along the Lombard Street corridor—host to a unique density of historic churches—highlighting both the broad narrative history of these spaces and their present-day status in a rapidly changing city. The project extends Wilson’s recent work with New York’s Danspace Project interrogating the history of St. Mark’s Church. Danspace’s Judy Hussie-Taylor served as a curatorial advisor to Wilson as he brought these concepts to Philadelphia. The series concluded with a week-long residency by Wilson and his Fist and Heel Performance Group at the Church of the Advocate in North Philadelphia, supported by the PEW Center for the Arts, Partners for Sacred Places, Center for Experimental Ethnography, and others.