A Place to Call Home
A Place to Call Home celebrates the cultural bearers who believe in the power of visual art to foster social change and community care. I have also used it as a form of scholarly reciprocity since the film has served to propel the Center and the artists’ work here in the Bay. In my larger dissertation work, of which this film serves a part, I use three modalities of visual geographic analysis – archival investigation, and community-based photographic production and film production – to investigate how contests over space in Oakland and Berkeley are routed through the realm of the visual, looking at the aesthetic terms and articulations of belonging and displacement through archival analysis and photographic and film production. It was a collaborative production between the La Peña Cultural Center and myself. We had a general purpose – to document the making of the new mural inside the center. I expanded the focus to an intergenerational cohort of artists who put their historical contexts into visual, public-educational murals. We shot this over the course of two months and edited for about eight months