I am writing this blog post because I need the help of Chloë Bass. I am currently putting together an album of photographs from my eight months being a foster parent to a three year old. My story is sad. The state removed her from my home abruptly a year ago, and we haven’t seen each other since. Best practice tells us that photo albums are a useful part of the healing process for kids in foster care to regain access to their time in former homes and the parts of their life that they experienced there and during that time. I am the keeper of eight months of her life.
Right now I am at an impasse with the process of making the albums because I don’t feel like I have the skill set to manage the grief.
The task I set is also hard. I am making two copies of the album; one that I hope will get to her, and one that I will keep in case the first gets lost. I have finished the first one, but putting together the second is laborious because I don’t have doubles of all the photos. As I create the replica, i am taking notes on which photos I need to reprint. Every photo for which I don’t have a double feels like a failure.
I had the idea this evening that maybe sitting with my memories of Chloë’s project with family photos and home movies may help me overcome the impasse.
Chloë began Obligation to Others Hold Me in My Place, an investigation into family, in January 2018 as she was finishing up her previous project The Book of Everyday Instruction which investigated dyadic relationships.
Obligation is an archive project. She sent a call out to her communities and friends for their old family photos. She also spent time exploring various archives of home movies and photographs. She had a residency at Recess Analog where she posted photos and text from her research mostly focused on interracial families including her own. She hosted Family Home Movie Nights where guests were invited to bring their own family photos and videos to show along with selections from the archive she has been compiling. Additionally she has been developing THIS IS A FILM which weaves text and clips from public archives of home movies including the Chicago Film Archive.
The work of working in the archive is that you have to keep going and that as you go through the archive you are hit with emotions and your own thoughts and memories. The art that Chloë makes perhaps then is a form of her processing.
The form of THIS IS A FILM manifests the relationship between archive and processing a personal response to the archive. Its first iteration, THIS IS A FILM 1.0 was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was part of the Friday night series where the museum bring contemporary artists to respond to the exhibits. Chloë was responding to the History Refused to Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift exhibit, and she gave a lecture-performance that wove descriptions of footage from the archives with quotes from writers including Lauren Berlant and bell hooks. The audience was given headphones so that they could walk around the exhibit and look as they listened although a few took off their headphones and gathered in front of Chloë as audiences do.
As THIS IS A FILM progressed Chloë revised the text by deleting sections and adding new ones, and she included video projection of clips from the archive. Often the clips are from parties where people are dancing.
I have a short video from THIS IS A FILM 1.3.1 that she performed at CRUSH #9, the reading series Susanne Goldberg hosts at Woodbine. Chloë sits on a chair reading from 8 1/2" by 11" white paper: “All the way up to $74.95, for young couple in love 1948 strange found family photo snapshot good looking cute. Like every other l…” Above her high on the wall near the gold-painted tin ceiling, one black man in what looks like a pink shirt has his arm around another black man in a red shirt. They are smiling. They are dancing.
The last and final THIS IS A FILM was performed at the Bronx River Arts Center as part of an event for the group show TABLEAU curated by Chad Strayrook. I missed THIS IS A FILM 1.9, but I did catch the show which included a television screen that looped THIS IS A FILM (1.2.1) and We say love (Tryptich). The center image of We say love has two images and text. The background is a black and white image of the belly and thighs of someone in a plaid shirt and pale trousers with a hand. The foreground is a color photo of what could be an interracial family: the father, black, in yellow shirt, construction hat, and large belt buckle, big smile, holding a brown toddler; the ginger mother in pink and white striped teeshirt her left arm draped across her brown daughter who stands in front of her and her right arm on the back of her husband. Underneath the images the text reads, “We say love like love solves problems, as if we never do terrible things to the people we hold in its name.” The picture looks like a picture of such a happy family, but the text underneath invites us to contemplate our initial reading of the image and the limits of images to tell the story of family.
I think my impasse is one of the discipline it takes to work in the archive. For me the moment of analysis, of starting to talk about what I am seeing as I look more closely is the enjoyable work. Or that’s what I’m ready to do now that the first album is finished. But, I can’t yet. I want to make sure I have the two copies and so the discipline of compiling the archive at times is emotionally challenging as I put organized method over immediate desire. Or, putting together the first album is putting together a photo album; putting together the second album is a confrontation of the reality that I need to put together the second album. If this were an interview with Chloë that’s what i’d ask her about. What was it like going through the archives? What were the hardest moments? What did you do to get through them? How did you balance the work of reading through the archive to compile your own with the work of writing about and making you own art from it?
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