IMPORTANT: 40-person audience maximum. Masks and proof of vaccination (2) is required to attend. Please read our full  pandemic policy 

EVENTBRITE FREE TICKETS HERE - on sale Dec 27 at 12:00 AM

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/x-traction-video-artists-screening-and-discussion-tickets-231248178527

 Media Artists Cathy Lee Crane and Jason Livingston will be in Bisbee and have been working with artists Nicole Antebi, Laurie McKenna and Erin Wilkerson to develop a novel, engaging way to create a database mix of their own digital outtakes from the Southwest alongside Bisbee community members’ video fragments. Whereas the logic of extraction is violently deliberate, the operative logic of this generative media work is generous, chance-based, and playful.

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COMMUNITY INTERSTICES
We are seeking  community video for this event! 20-60  sec videos shot from you phone. email it to bisbeecsp@gmail.com
  DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JAN 3, 2022

WE WANT YOUR VIDEO !!!!!!
​LETTERS FROM BISBEE: NOTES FROM THE INNER AND OUTER RING

Bisbee area! (OB, Warren, Lowell, San Jose, Don Louis, Tintown, Saginaw, Bakerville, McNeal, Galina, Double Adobe, Mule Mountains, Don Louis, Hereford, Douglas, Naco you get the idea! ).

We want your 20-60 second videos. Consider capturing that which is not appealing to tourists,  or concerns about the border of abuse of resources (living space, water, wilderness) ! How are you in this space? What is your place? Show us the brilliantly mundane, the every-day overlooked, that which is not in an advertisement:. What spaces do you inhabit? bisbeecsp@gmail.com

 (X)-trACTION begins and ends in Bisbee, Arizona.  Local artists were invited to contribute observations of life in Bisbee which are included in tonight’s program as interstitial seams that make their way through the sequence of five artists’ films to form a meta mash-up deposit concerned for our climate, our workers, our history and future- the beauty and the failures. Whereas the logic of extraction is violently deliberate, the operative logic of this generative media work [aka tonight’s program] is generous, chance-based, and playful. 

Mid-century postcards, front and back, offer invaluable if obscured views in Nicole Antebi’s archival re-animation of Roberto López Díaz’s depictions of la frontera.  Geography plays across multiple enactments in Cathy Lee Crane’s video, which asserts the primacy of water and migration in the dust of militarized landscapes.  Laurie McKenna conjures desert punk power in an aggregate of memory and charcoal, and grounds national rupture in a sonic diary.  Erin Wilkerson and Jason Livingston, in their contributions, draw poetic power lines through industry, reminding us that extraction, for all its local magnetism and metal lures, is a view into international dynamics. 

Running through the program are Letters from Bisbee, those ants, dollar store parking lots, and water spiders which place the screening in a specific space, the palimpsest sunbaked everyday life of the Borderlands.  How is it that the societies we live in produce food deserts while the demand for satellite feeds goes up and up?  What might a supply chain of simple hungry ants tell us?  When we look at plastic bags hung to dry like laundry, do we welcome wind, that great renewable, to re-use?  Does every cracked car windshield need repair?  We extend our gratitude to Lizann Michaud, Pam Rodrigues, Jan Searle. Rafaela Valenzuela, Janet Reynolds, and Laurie McKenna for their participation.

The Smoke Rides on the Wind, 2021, 13:41

Erin Wilkerson

Histories of global oil extraction and movement entangle with stories of colonial settlement and threatened ecologies. An autoethnographic field work on erasure and displacement. Filmed on site in California and Singapore, situated within the regional Ring of Fire.

The Loyalty League, 2020, 4:15

Laurie McKenna

The Undesirables Project 2017

The Bisbee deportation of 1917 in the mining town of Bisbee, Arizona.
A performance with toys that considers the tactics and cruelty of nationalistic and anti-worker bullying. 

100 Partially Obscured Views / 100 Vistas Parcialmente Oscurecidas, 2022, 25 min

Nicole Antebi

Roberto López Díaz was a prominent postcard maker in Juárez, Chihuahua, and Mexico in the 1950s and 60s. His Tarjeta Postales thoroughly documented a moment in time that is now difficult to access. Some of the locations repeat showing different vantage points of the same place. The animated sequences are designed in part to highlight the points of transition between the views, ranging from public monuments proposals, childhood memories, the impact of current policies on people and land, and other interrogations of a border landscape that I’ve witnessed transform into a highly militarized zone. El Paso and Juárez share history, share people, share each other’s gaze, their differences are constructed by imperialist treaties and policies, and obstructions that insist on their difference. 

terrestial sea, 2022, 14:30

Cathy Lee Crane

in collaboration with Luc O. Houle 

Rivers and their traces in the borderlands begin in the empty river bottom awaiting the release from Elephant Butte dam on to a navigation re-enactment of the Rio Grande and then to the seabed of Camp Naco. At the convergence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers, all combine to usher a stream of migrants across the Sonoran desert sea floor. This is the second chapter of an ongoing, borderlands project entitled Drawing the Line. 

Ancient Sunshine, 2020, 19:28

Jason Livingston
A fossil cast in plastic, an artificial plateau, classic cars running on the fumes of the nation. Ancient Sunshine interweaves the endless remaking of the Western landscape with labor history, reflections on anarchist organization, and interspecies economies, such as animal husbandry. Ancient Sunshine consists of interviews with the Utah Tar Sands Resistance primary organizers and other Utah land protectors, and sets their voices in and against an industrialized landscape. The film draws attention to the role of resistance and kinship during times of threat and extinction. 

Aggregate, 2022, 5:51

Laurie McKenna

A diary aggregating photography, drawings, notes and video of the first pandemic year created as an element for a multidisciplinary installation piece. Living through the border-wall building in her community, media coverage of political chaos, resistance, abuse of the press, drought, death, and the desert wildlife.

1. “a whole formed by combining several (typically disparate) elements”

2. “a material or structure formed from a loosely compacted mass of fragments or particle