Ramps to Nowhere
65min, Color/BW, Mixed Media, ©2019
Trailer to film https://vimeo.com/311577847/21acf736aa
photo is a still from the film.
Through the collage of composited aerial photographs, maps, and archival footage of actual and imagined construction zones with a multi-layered soundtrack of voices, Ramps to Nowhere illustrates how citizen activism interrupted land use and public policy.
The films’ claims build on each other through my use of compositing of up to twelve images at a time. Each composite gives a unique representation of land or people, and through the ghost-layering of these combined images, new possibilities surface with regard to visualizing relationships between state violence and land use. Camerawork, in other words, includes both videographic records that I recorded recently, and the creative reuse of stills and moving images recorded by others in the more distant past. It is partly about co-presence, but also about strategies for exceeding that in a composited image. In this film, image and audio compositing enables makers and audiences to engage with a topography of historical representations, providing access to overlapping and converging truths.
Ramps to Nowhere
Film is temporarily available for free here and on Cinemad Online site and will eventually be housed in public archives.
Ramps to Nowhere
In the late 1960s, when plans were unveiled for a dense network of
freeways in Seattle, an unlikely alliance of people formed to stop
them. This experimental documentary investigates the ghostly remains
of those roads to unearth a triumphant story of citizen activism.