Environments of Struggle: Crystal Z. Campbell and Christopher Harris

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Join us for an evening with artists Crystal Z. Campbell and Christopher Harris in person!

Focusing on landscapes of decay and material traces of structural neglect, the films of Crystal Z. Campbell and Christopher Harris challenge our perception of American injustice. Campbell’s films GO-RILLA MEANS WAR (2017) and A MEDITATION ON NATURE IN THE ABSENCE OF AN ECLIPSE (2021) use found footage to trace fraught histories, from gentrification in Bed-Stuy to the water crisis in Flint, MI. Christopher Harris’ STILL/HERE (2001) bracingly documents the derelict architecture of North St. Louis, an open monument to systemic disinvestment in Black communities. Harris and Campbell will appear after the screening to discuss the ways their films offer techniques for visualizing and challenging the “slow violence” of environmental racism.

About the artists:

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets— fragments of information known by many but untold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks' “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Sonic, material, and archival traces of the witness informs their work in film, performance, installation, sound, painting, and writing.

Christopher Harris is a filmmaker whose films and video installations read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work employs manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged re-enactments of archival artifacts and interrogations of documentary conventions. His award-winning experimental films include a long-take look at a post-industrial urban landscape, an optically printed and hand-processed film about black outlaws, a pinhole film about the cosmic consequences of the sun’s collapse, a macro lens close up of a child’s nightlight and a double-projection film about a theme park performance of Christ’s Passion. His work has been exhibited at festivals, museums and cinematheques throughout North America and Europe.

 
Presented by the Climate Crisis and Media Arts Working Group with support from the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

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