Portrait of a Cooperative documents the daily activities of one of the longest-running African American farmer cooperatives located in southern Mississippi, US. Building on the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement, this cooperative was formed as a means for farmers to collectively secure better prices and overcome racial discrimination. Over the years, the cooperative has sustained many farmers and improved food access and economic development in the area. However, the survival of the cooperative is at risk, as family farming increasingly loses out to industrial agriculture prompting younger generations to quit farming. This documentary short offers a sensory engagement with the practices and activities surrounding the cooperative, exploring how and why these farmers sustain their farming traditions.
This vignette offers a means to view environmental perception and knowledge as a series of relationships and processes. The film engages how the farmer moves through and relates to the environment combining discursive, performative, and sensory information as an unfolding sequence. Through his interaction with the organizer, we see how the farmer contends with and negotiates his practice with external institutions and alternative ways of knowing. As an intermediary, the organizer both relates to and challenges the farmer, straddling different frames of knowledge production. The farmer similarly incorporates diverse forms of knowledge into his practice. At the same time, he advocates for the uniqueness and value of his way of knowing.
In the spring of 2013, the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives created a Beginning Farmer Reality Tour in order to reveal the hidden and unknown realities of the farming industry for new and beginning African American farmers. The tour combined workshops and presentations, but the heart of the tour consisted of on-farm conversations with older, established farmers. The new farmers were encouraged to ask frank and honest questions not just about technical aspects of farming, but about the social, political, and economic structures surrounding farming in Mississippi, thus revealing hidden and unspoken realities.
This project was designed as a landscape video, capturing the images of land in rural Alabama, and the stories of those who claim rights to it. Combining ethnographic practices with the aesthetic of landscape art, the film aims to capture a living landscape through its relationship with people. Using oral history and personal stories the video aims to retell the landscape, revealing a symbolic and temporal layer of understanding, and questioning the multiple meanings behind land rights. This project pushes the boundaries of my own subjectivity and draws new elements from the genres of landscape art, storytelling, and oral histories.
Mediating Stories: A Study on Documenting Development
This film served as part of my final Masters thesis at the University of Manchester. Focusing on the legacy of farming in the idyllic hills of Yorkshire, this film examines two different approaches to farming and the variations in ideologies and practices between them.
My first attempt to create a documentary film began by looking at the farming practices in my own family. Through interviews with family members and their friends and neighbors, this piece looks at the experiences of farmers operating in America's heartland.
The film explores the dark surrealism that haunts the process of transition by exploring an individual’s “Present” and his alter ego “Past.”
This is a conversation between 9 short films, by 9 filmmakers associated with the Visual Scholarship Initiative (VSI), created as a response to our experiences during the pandemic. Mimicking in arrangement the monthly Zoom meetings we had, the films offer observational, reflexive and experimental perspectives that collectively represent both the kinds of work we do in content and in concept.
Films forthcoming...
This short was made at the request of the Wounded Knee Visitors Center on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Its purpose is to bring awareness to the experience of the Lakota living here and to encourage tourists to visit the Lakota run center.
Sustainable Rural Regenerative Enterprises for Families is a non-profit organization focusing on rural development in the US South. This piece was made for the organization's website and promotional efforts.
Cafe Nuba was a monthly television who airing on FSTV. This ad was used to promote the show.
As part of my work with Sankofa Spirit, I helped youth create their own create their own short film about their experiences traveling to Ghana.
This interview was part of the monthly show, Cafe Nuba, which aired on FSTV.
