2023-24 Community Fellow
with Utica Institute Museum for Diaspora Solidarities Lab
The Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL) is a multi-institutional Black feminist partnership that supports solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies conducted by undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members, and community partners who are committed to transformative justice and accountable to communities beyond the Western academy.
The DSL Community Fellows are non-academic/non-institutionally affiliated community organizers, artists, cultural workers or groups who collaborate on projects with other participants and innovate DSL-sponsored projects of their own. The DSL Community Fellows program invests in collaborative community work and supporting practitioners doing the work where they are.
As a 2023-24 DSL Community Fellow, johnson continues to expand his work in Utica, MS, returning to a relationship with the Utica Institute Museum (UIM) and the work of Director Jean Greene and Hinds-Utica CC English Professor Dan Fuller. Working together to build on the UIM bus tour through the Town of Utica, johnson, Greene, and Fuller are collaborating to create a site specific museum interpretive device bringing oral histories to life at specific public sites of memory for the Utica Institute and founder William H. Holtzclaw.
Inspired by the 1904 Brownie No. 2, johnson is building a small, handheld device which captures the scene in front of you under layers of visual and audio memory. The Kodak Brownie was the first affordable, portable camera for everyday people. This camera democratized access to capturing our memories on film and creating displays of ones life and memory in image in their home. This interpretive device is the same size and must be held and viewed in the same way as the Brownie viewfinder, but instead of taking pictures, it will present a ghostly image to the viewer of a site of memory cast over the site as it exists today. Dr. Holtzclaw opened the Utica Institute in 1904 and the physical experience of holding and operating the device brings a somatic resonance between the contemporary viewer and the Utica Institute Museum alumni arriving as some of the schools first students.
Working with the Utica Institute Museum, johnson is 3d printing a shell for this prototype modeled after the Kodak Brownie. The device houses a periscope mirror arrangement with a laser etched plexi glass slide casting an image of a historic building over the contemporary site. Mounted in the top is a small speaker which will play a 30 second collage of oral histories from former students with memories of the site. The original positioning of the aperture slide and film advance dial are now the locations to play the oral history track and select the corresponding site. There will be plexi slides and accompanying oral histories to accommodate three sites on the bus tour.
The prototype is still in development ~
The shell is complete and can be fully unfolded to reveal the innerworkings to tour groups. The wiring is complete but the speaker is cutting out and not playing the full track while also only allowing for one play. johnson will be troubleshooting with an electrician friend in November to iron out the final details.
The etching of the photograph is currently a silhouette stand-in. It is curious the way the eye focuses back and forth between the plexi etching and the scene beyond. johnson is going to experiment with creating a vector line drawing of the building which will make visible more of the scene beyond within the building etching to see how that feels to viewers.
In October 2024, johnson is joining other Community Fellow cohort members for a panel discussion at Across the Archipelagos: The Diaspora Solidarities Lab Final Symposium at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston, SC.
revised 10/16/2024
Stay tuned here for updates.
daniel@significantdevelopments.us — Jackson, Mississippi