My project goal is to craft what I’m now referring to as a ‘digital gallery’ of local labor, stories, art, and experiences, highlighting the people that live and work in Down-East, ME. Those who don’t leave during the tourist season and enable the capital infrastructure like the farms, tourist spots, restaurants, museums, etc… to function.
As a Maine native for 17 years now, in a small, coastal town in Maine with a focus on agricultural or commercial (fishing + aquaculture) infrastructure and tourism. Focusing on the people that work and live in the area and their products and lives outside of commercial tourism is massively important to me. Fisherman in my area provide Lobster or Oysters for expensive restaurants but most tourists don’t like coming into contact with them. Nor, do summer residents enjoy seeing oyster farms obscuring ‘their’ view. Not to say it’s the exact same or even similar in Eastport or Down-East; however, I know that it’s easy to overlook the class of individuals that allow for these massive webs of natural resource and beauty to be brought to market ever year.
That’s my goal here. My medium, the digital gallery hopefully will be a audio/visual presentation. I’m probably going to arrange it in Adobe, editing video, pictures, and audio recordings into a viewable piece. My goal is to either interview and photo locals or ask locals to submit photos of their art, audio of their thoughts and lives, or video they’ve taken. Not to make them do the work for me but rather to act as a joint ‘host’ for their collective experiences.
Some questions I want to ask, regardless of if I receive submissions or start getting the photos/audio on my own.
1. “Your name, age, home-town?”
2. “How long have you lived in Down-East, ME? Do you consider it your home?”
3. “How have blueberries influenced or effected your life? Alternatively, how do you in turn effect blueberry production or consumption?”
4. “What’s an important, behind the scenes aspect of blueberries [your involvement with blueberry infrastructure] ?”
5. “What’s a special memory you have of the Down-East?”
I also hope to speak with our speaker on Thursday, David Stess, as he apparently has a large amount of content for a similar project. I have not really formulated anything physically but that’s due to current limitations. If I end up doing the media myself. I’ll carve out time to go visit the area and hopefully interview photograph some farmers, workers, or members of the community at large. Whether that be through the program itself or by going personally and asking to do short interviews in person.
The thought process being that the final product will be like Banky’s “Exit Through the Gift Shop” where Banksy takes tons of live, raw footage and sews it together to represent various artists and creatives in the community, using others’ actual footage. However, it wouldn’t be as a ‘mockery’ of the original film (sort of what Banksy does to Thierry) but rather as a symbol of beneficial collaboration and/or literal representation of the Down-East community.