In association with camra and collaborating curator Arjun Shankar, Ethnographic Terminalia presents:
Sweet Tea
Sweet Tea, a feature-length experimental/ethnographic documentary, will follow the personal and scholarly trajectory of researcher and activist E. Patrick Johnson. Johnson (the first Black man from his small town of Hickory, North Carolina, to earn a PhD) uses social scientific and humanistic methods to examine questions of identity and community in contemporary society. As someone who has documented his own coming-out story, Johnson also seeks to understand the many different experiences of Black gay men from the South and to share their stories with audiences through both scholarly and artistic means. Most recently, he has transformed his extensive ethnographic life history interviews with gay Black Southerners into a one-man theatrical show, Sweet Tea. This ethnographic film (of the same name) will combine footage from the rehearsal and production of that show with documentary moments from the lives of both Johnson and his interview participants, depicting both his research process and the complexities of his relationships with the men in his study. The film, much like Johnson’s work itself, attempts to transcend conventional assumptions about what counts as “scholarship”—and to reimagine how such scholarship can/should be shared. How do we represent portions of other people’s life stories? How do those stories impact us as researchers and viewers? What does it even mean to blur the boundaries between art and science, scholarship and activism, and what’s to be gained from doing so? Sweet Tea, the film, attempts to place these interconnected themes and questions in critical and creative conversation.
Experimental/ethnographic documentary
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The Bureau of Memories: Archives and Ephemera is a thematic reflection on the archive and its discontents. Washington’s identity as the seat of American political power is amplified through its role as the locus of its own memorialization. Where there is history, there is haunting. By drawing on the archive’s unnerving, uncanny, and ephemeral specters, this exhibition is an effort to re-imagine and reposition archives as sites which not only have the capacity to produce and contest historical memory, but also generate significant gaps and blind spots.