This workshop considers the oral history interview as an ‘act of translation' and explores embodied ways of knowing and being.
About this event
What does it mean to have BIPOC voices at the center of our practice—what are we inviting them to speak on, or claim authority over? We know that oral history has the ability to document the experiences of BIPOC life, but can our approach to the interview go beyond the chronicling of what has happened to them? Can we also prioritize and harness oral history’s potential to record, elevate, and assert ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of knowing’ our shared world that have been historically delegitimized and overlooked?
Our embodied experiences are also our particular expertise on the world. The reality of BIPOC life becomes a particular education, one that shapes unique strategies of surviving and thriving; of sense-making; ways of seeing, interpreting, and “reading” the moments, politics, and interactions of daily life—it is embodied knowledge, embodied authority. How can our practice better ‘hear’ and legitimize embodied knowledge(s)? In this workshop, we will consider the oral history interview as an ‘act of translation’, an approach that permissions the narrator to be both the ‘teller’ of their story, and also the first interpreter of their lived experience. We will discuss forms of un-hearing that can interrupt this process; reflect on the making and un-making of agency and authority in the interview by introducing both the language and concept of permission; and consider the oral history encounter as a ‘space of remembering’ and translation.
Nyssa Chow is an oral historian, multidisciplinary artist, and writer. She is an Assistant Professor in the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) and Film and Media department at Skidmore College where she teaches interdisciplinary documentary arts. She is a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at MIT Media Labs (Poetic Justice Group led by artist Ekene Ijeoma). She has served as core faculty at the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University; as Visiting Scholar at The Humanities Council at Princeton University, and as a co-director of the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project at Columbia University (I.N.C.I.T.E).
Chow was Lead Artist Facilitator for the 2021 DocX Labs at The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, co-founded and conceived with documentarians Martine Granby and Stephanie Owens. The nine month DocX Fellowship was founded to support BIPOC emerging and mid-career artists build networks with like minded practitioners across the spectrum of documentary arts, and to serve as a space where community, meaningful conversation, and deep engagement with art practice could be possible. She was the 2019-2021 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts, and has served as Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton University, as Visiting Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, and as Visiting Assistant Professor in the BFA Film Program at Purchase College. She was the 2018 Recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein for Literary Oral History won for the immersive literary oral history project ‘The Story of Her Skin’. This project also won the Columbia University Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Chow has collaborated with filmmakers and artists, most recently with Jennifer Wen Ma on her exhibition An Inward Sea for the New Britain Museum of Art. Their current collaboration, an expansion of the The Inward Sea: Oral History, earned fiscal sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).
Chow has conducted oral histories on behalf of arts institutions such as the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and has lectured widely on the intersection of art and oral history; embodied knowledge and listening; and literary oral history. Her solo exhibition Still, Life., a series of installations using sound, light and assemblage was held at Gallery One in Trinidad. Her most recent work Trace: A Memorial was exhibited in the group exhibition ‘How We Remember’ at the Miriam and Ira D Wallach Art Gallery in New York City. Nyssa was born in Trinidad and is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Film program and Columbia University's Oral History Masters Program.
2023 NEPH Consortium
Along with the Bard Graduate Center, the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, and INCITE, OHMA is co-hosting the 2023 gathering of the Northeastern Public Humanities Consortium.
As part of the gathering, we are offering free, in-person workshops in the morning on Saturday, April 22 (our first in-person training workshops since 2020!) as well as a public panel on Friday, April 21, featuring INCITE's I See My Light Shining project. See and register for all public events here.