In Conversation: Co-Creation and Equity, Five Media-Makers of Color Speak Out

In Conversation: Co-Creation and Equity

Five Media-Makers of Color Speak Out, Part I

As part of our series for the Collective Wisdom field study, we present an excerpt from a conversation between Juanita Anderson, Maria Agui Carter, Thomas Allen Harris, Maori Karmael Holmes, and Michèle Stephenson.

Read Part II, Part III , Part IV, and Part V here.

There is a political yearning and narrative turn toward a more ethical form of storytelling inherent in the co-creation process. This is undoubtedly an auspicious moment. However, for media makers of color, there’s one vital concern. While it has been acknowledged that the co-creation of stories can be traced back to early civilizations, there has not been an explicit recognition of the specific ways media makers of color have shaped and inspired contemporary co-creation practices, emerging from accountability to their communities, the drive for more complex representation, and the necessity of creating media with fewer financial resources than their white counterparts.

Oftentimes, media makers of color, especially those documenting urgent political issues, are faced with increased demands of proving their professional media-making expertise within the field, acting as cultural interpreters between their communities and the field, and ensuring respectful engagement of their cultural communities. This complex navigation has given rise to deeply organic and mindful co-creation processes that predate the increasingly popular use of the term within the media-making field.

To present co-creation within media as a re-emergent practice without explicitly acknowledging the longstanding co-creative approaches practiced by communities of color doesn’t simply erase their work, it undermines the very tenets of co-creation.

At its core, co-creation seeks to reconcile systemic power and singular authority. This fundamental principle extends beyond the creative process within media-making, compelling all of us to interrogate fundamental ideas of ownership, meaning-making, attribution and — if we optimize the potential of co-creation — realize a more just society. With this larger imperative in mind, this conversation seeks to provide an overview of the longstanding co-creative practices of artists of color.

The idea for this work is derived from a break-out group conversation, which took place at the two-day symposium, COLLECTIVE WISDOM: Co-Creating Media with Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms, organized by the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Its content is not meant to be comprehensive nor does this work represent the multifarious approaches and perspectives of media makers. The functions of this dialogue are to begin to map the history of co-creation across communities of color within the U.S., to explore non-institutional power, innovation, and co-operation amongst media makers of color, and to unpack the uncalculated costs and labor of deep co-creation processes.

The content presented here is based on a conversation structured around a series of prompts that have been edited for brevity and includes our collective voices.

Maria Agui Carter is an Indigenous Latinx/Chinese immigrant who grew up undocumented in NYC and graduated from Harvard. She is an award-winning filmmaker (Iguanafilms.com), teaches as an Assistant Professor at Emerson College, and serves on the Diversity Coalition of the WGA (Writers Guild of America).

Thomas Allen Harris is an artist who uses media, photography, and performance to explore family and identity, in a participatory model of filmmaking, since 1990. He is presently in production on Family Pictures USA — a new PBS series that examines America through the lens of the “family photo album,” slated for national broadcast in 2019. Born in the Bronx and raised in East Africa, Harris is a graduate of Harvard College with a degree in biology and is presently a Senior Lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches courses related to his socially engaged art project, Digital Diaspora Family Reunion.

Maori Karmael Holmes is a filmmaker, writer, and curator. She is founder and artistic director of the BlackStar Film Festival. She has organized programs in film at a myriad of organizations including Anthology Film Archives, Institute of Contemporary Art — Philadelphia, Lightbox Film Center, Museum of Contemporary Art — Los Angeles, The Underground Museum, and The Whitney Museum. As a filmmaker, her works have screened internationally.

Michèle Stephenson is a Brooklyn-based media maker, author and artist who pulls from her Haitian and Panamanian roots to tell complex intimate stories by, for, and about, communities of color. Along with her partner, Joe Brewster, she co-founded multiple award-winning media production company, Rada Film Group.

Juanita Anderson is a veteran producer and documentary filmmaker who proudly hails from Detroit, Michigan. Her career as a producer, director, production manager, and executive producer includes 17 years at public television stations WSIU, WTVS, and WGBH before embarking on a career in independent media in 1993. A former lead producer of two of public television’s longest-running African-American television series, Detroit Black Journal and Say Brother, she co-founded the National Black Programming Consortium (now Black Public Media) in 1978. Anderson joined the faculty of the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in 2003, where she currently heads the Media Arts and Studies program. She also serves as a principal advisor to the Detroit Narrative Agency.

Part I: Interrogating the mainstream framing of media-making

Juanita: For me, the moment that I questioned what we were doing at MIT was during a panel session where someone commented that they spoke to the community members rather than journalists. I was thinking, obviously, as people of color, we always speak to our communities first. We’ve been working from a co-creation model for decades — taking us right back to the history of African American, Latinx, and Asian American programming in public television back in the late 1960s. Television series like Black Horizons in Pittsburgh, Say Brother in Boston, and Detroit Black Journal—all launched in 1968—had community advisory boards and community input all along the way in terms of both the content and management of those programs. The failure to recognize this and many other histories demonstrates an issue in current co-creation conversations that hasn’t been resolved. There doesn’t seem to be a priority to support media-makers of color working within their own communities. Are we talking about white media-makers going into communities where they have never been before?

Thomas: I definitely concur with what Juanita says. It’s also important to note that within the larger context of colonialism, there is a certain class of people going in and telling stories of a wide range of historically marginalized communities. Today, because of the economics of long-form documentary production as well as pressure by distributors for diversity of representation, there is increased talk of co-creation, which I think is a response to these changes. I’m wondering if collaboration is really happening or whether it’s a certain kind of blackface or Asian face — a cover to continue to exploit these communities for content and access to funding and distribution in an age of multiculturalism.

A focus of many of my mentors — William Greaves, St. Clair Bourne, Pearl Bowser, Marlon Riggs, Camille Billips — was critiquing dominant modes of representation that served to disenfranchise their communities while simultaneously empowering these communities by providing access to tools, a voice as well as modalities of storytelling that communities could use for self-representation. This process, and the community building it engendered, was considered in some cases just as important as the final film.

This process of community engagement as part of the production, together with a merging of art and activism, placed many of these projects within the avant-garde. I’m thinking particularly of Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, or Camille Billops’ Suzanne Susanne, or the early pioneers of black independent film that Pearl Bowser’s work has documented over decades, or Marlon Rigg’s Tongue Untied. Yet, much of this work was not critically appraised sufficiently within the field until years after they were made, if ever. This benign neglect, often due to the work’s resistance of certain stereotypical narratives, resulted in their marginalization so that today some can speak about co-creation as something new, without feeling the responsibility to find and cite precedence within media makers of color that have long been ignored by the mainstream. The result is a kind of a painful double negation. So, as we revisit or re-package the concept of co-creation, it’s important for us to interrogate our power relationships and our motivations vis-à-vis process, community as well as outcomes.

Michèle: Yeah. I want to affirm what’s already been said. I also want to question the current emphasis on co-creation in the field. Is it simply a way to legitimize a space for dominant culture to continue to be involved in telling our stories; a way of keeping some sort of white control and presence over narratives by and about communities of color? I won’t get into the whole capitalism versus collaboration model that has existed in media-making for a long, long, time, but, as Thomas mentioned, power is shifting more significantly now in dominant spaces. We can’t ignore that this co-creation conversation is gaining all this visibility and weight at a time when people of color are commanding more authorship power. Suddenly, single authorship is being questioned and talk of co-creation is taking place within the mainstream.

Maria: I couldn’t agree more with Michèle, Juanita, and Thomas — such great points. I originally studied anthropology, a discipline predicated on the belief that it is possible for an outsider to parachute into a community and gain access to its culture, knowledge, and stories, then speak for them to the rest of the world. I remember reading Claude Levi Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, a book by the much celebrated French anthropologist, one of the fathers of anthropology whose memoir I found racist and problematic.

As one of the “natives” that he would have talked about, I found him to be so bound by his own cultural biases that he could not truly see, and I questioned his capacity to spend limited time with a community and yet understand it well enough to properly frame the story or ask the right questions. He is someone who spent little time in the field and yet made sweeping pronouncements about how the “natives” thought. I think of the arrogance of his observations and his many books as an “expert” on other cultures given he was known to have said, “fieldwork is a kind of women’s work (which is probably why women are so successful at it) … I had neither the interest nor the patience for it.”

It reminds me of documentary filmmaking when people (usually extremely sympathetic and well-meaning) from outside our communities of color choose to speak for us without having put in the equivalent of the research and field work that earns them the right to make those observations. The research we do as filmmakers of color about our own communities often lasts a lifetime and is not just that of lived or shared experience. So many of us specialize not just in the craft of filmmaking, but in reading and researching the arts, the culture, the politics of our own people and our communities as well as those of the larger communities around us.

With regards to co-creation and collaboration, as filmmakers of color making films about our communities, we have always felt that we needed to speak and to listen to those from within. Yet we are not credited by the power structures as experts. Instead, we are often accused of bias. Nor are we often funded adequately to tell our own stories. For instance, in the foundation world in the United States, the last studies I read showed that Latinx organizations across all fields receive about one percent of all foundation dollars — that includes everything, from direct services to the arts and film. Yet we make up almost 18% of the US population and we now have a very large community of trained Latinx media-makers and storytellers. And so, it’s not just that our stories need to be told, it’s important that the world respect, fund, and support our telling our own stories.

This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.

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