Crystal Z Campbell and Christopher Harris Named 2020-21 Radcliffe-FSC Fellows
We are thrilled to announce that Crystal Z Campbell and Christopher Harris are 2020-21 Radcliffe-FSC Fellows.
Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of African-American, Filipino, & Chinese descents. Campbell’s practice is an excavation of public secrets using live performance, installation, sound, painting, film/video, and texts. Campbell engages with material, archival, and sonic traces of the witness––recent works revisit Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cell line, perform minute and monumental gestures in a coastal Swedish landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a now demolished Black Civil Rights theater (The Slave Theater) in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Campbell is currently working on a film around the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre entitled: SLICK. (Photo credit: Jeremy Charles)
Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. In his work, he appropriates and alters archival films, photographs and audio through a variety of manual and photochemical processes, staged re-enactments and hybrid forms.
At Radcliffe and the Film Study Center, Harris will work on Speaking in Tongues, a 16mm experimental film collage of manually and optically altered original documentary and archival film sourced from Hollywood movies, television commercials, educational films, cartoons, European art cinema and miscellaneous ephemera that analogizes the discourse of racialized criminality and the carceral apparatus with the conventions and mechanics of the cinematic apparatus.
This year’s Radcliffe Institute Fellowship program will look a little different with a virtual program planned with hope for a residential component to be included based on Covid-19 developments and Harvard University policy. We look forward to welcoming Crystal and Christopher to the Film Study Center!