Happy Anniversary, San Francisco, March 20-21, 2003
Single-channel video, 4:30, 2004.
This piece assembles clips from exactly a year prior to the event at which it was initially shown, which fell on the anniversary of the start of a war still being waged. Every clip is exactly ten seconds long, and they are shown in the order they were shot, ending with the last video I shot on March 21 of a San Francisco police officer throwing a blind man to the ground (which was then sent by bicycle to a National Lawyers’ Guild office for an eventual police brutality lawsuit). Much of the video I shot over this two-day period was documentation of arrests and police activity for legal rather than media/documentary purposes, and I found much of it extremely difficult to watch almost a year later. My intention in structuring the piece as a series of longer takes was to counteract the trend, even among activist videos (such as the “We Interrupt this Empire…” project using footage from the same groups) to imitate network news pacing and framing.
Initial exhibition: LMCC/Workspace Program, Woolworth Building, 2004
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