CLASS NOTES
[work-in-progress]

Class Notes examines my fascination with the format of the alumni news bulletin by staging, categorizing, and displaying a database of 99 videotaped readings (performed by volunteer actors in a studio space) from my 10-year Harvard College reunion book. Through the laborious process of generating these performances and sifting through their possible modes of classification, Class Notes meditates on notions of achievement, self-representation, performance, and (eponymously) class. Class Notes considers the alumni report as a communal autobiographical space, a collectively authored mythology of a successful elite. At the same time, I see Class Notes as a kind of group docu-fictional portrait of my generation’s uneasy negotiation with new adult identities: embedded in breathless, optimistic prose are (often inadvertent) shadow narratives of heartbreak and failure that trouble the discourse of triumph and personal fulfillment. The final Class Notes video database will be exhibited online, situating the public-private performative tensions inherent to the readings of class notes in the growing context of the web-based exhibition of personal information.

THE MOTHERHOOD ARCHIVES
[work-in-progress]

The Motherhood Archives will be a long-form (55-75 minutes) experimental documentary film exploring the historical construction of motherhood: a visual archival history of the childbirth/childcare education film in the twentieth century will be interwoven with contemporary documentary material to form a multilayered cine-essay problematizing the manufacturing of modern motherhood as identity, ideology, scientific construct, and psychological state. At the heart of the film will be a series of informal filmed encounters with new mothers and mothers-to-be: filmed on 16 mm film with sync sound, these interactions will attempt to recreate the intimate conversational women’s space of 1970s feminist documentary films (projects like Joyce at 34 and Growing Up Female) while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of recapturing a mode of discourse that has largely been erased in the ensuing decades. Currently, The Motherhood Archives is in preproduction

THE WORRY BOX PROJECT
[work-in-progress]

A companion website to The Motherhood Archives, The Worry Box Project is a collective web-based archive based on the concept of a virtual “worry box”: visitors to the website will have the option of selecting one of two categories (“anxiety dreams” and “waking anxieties”) where they will be able to anonymously submit a written worry; they will also be able to view the anxieties and dreams of other women. Over the course of the duration of the active phase of this website project (which will last for one year), I will transcribe by hand each submission, and place each transcribed slip of paper into an actual physical box. The website will be updated weekly with new worries (displayed as images of the handwritten slips of paper) as well as an updated photograph of the worry box as it fills up with paper slips. Inspired by public spaces of collective yearning and embodied wishing rituals (like the Wailing Wall and the Fontana di Trevi), I imagine this web-based project as a revision of these spaces of hopeful iteration: posited against a contemporary motherhood culture that has become relentlessly optimistic and positive (and very much at odds with the tremendous anxieties of modern parenting), the virtual Worry Box Project provides a safe collective space for women to express fears, worries, and negative feelings about motherhood, generating a communal articulation of anxiety.