It was a great pleasure re-reading and editing the interviews I made in Steelton for the Migrations of Many artwork. I will most likely make two more edits on paper before I begin editing the audio from the interviews. I then link these audio excerpts together for the soundtrack. The soundtrack is what you will hear inside the Cocoon in Steelton in early September.
I have a few more interviews to make this spring in Steelton.
We reached our goal!
All the donations will go to my next exciting project: Cocoon Steelton: The Migrations of Many. It will help me to pay a local Field Organizer to work with me to bring the community together to participate in the interviews, the procession and come to the illumination of the Cocoon.
Build of the most recent Cocoon Miskolc: Following the Removals ©Eric Etheridge
Donors of Cocoon 2022 Year-End campaign :
Nancy Ahn, Mary & Joe Ambrosio, Anne Selden Yellott Annab, Jenny Baldwin, Neil Barsky & Joan Davidson Foundation, Jeff Bergman, Meg Browne, Tam & Nora Etheridge, Nancy Finn, Karen Goldfeder, Christina Heintzelman, Jill Hurst-Wahl, Hypermur & Renaud Cousin, Jeffrey Keenan, James & Shelly Macdonald, Darlene Marshall, Caitlin McGeer, Albert Naglieri, Sarah O'Neill, Thomas O’Leary, Michele Owens, Paola Panero, Mark Parsells, Renée Philippi, Ted Porter, Anne, Robert, Mack & Ford Porter-Etheridge, Smaïl Kanouté, Alfred Thoman, Rosemary Wettenhall, Amy Wilentz, and Tara Williams.
THANK YOU ALL!
by Christina Heintzelman
Thank you Christina Heintzelman for this really nice piece with many photos about Cocoon in the Harrisburg Magazine.
https://harrisburgmagazine.com/arts-culture/cocoon-the-emergence-of-historical-legacy/
Christina’s article came about because I’m currently working on a Cocoon, The Migrations of Many, for Steelton, PA. The Steelton steel plant is one of three rail producers in the Americas. I’ve partnered with the 1688 Local USW Union and have been interviewing residents and past and present steelworkers from the Steelton mill and Eric Etheridge has been taking formal portraits. The performance installation will happened in Fall 2023 in Steelton and then go to SAM in 2024 for their spring exhibition.
On May 16, 1944, Romani rose up against Nazi death camp guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The entire block of Roma men, women, and children were to be exterminated to make room for a transport of Hungarian Jews who had been marked capable of work. The uprising delayed the murder of the Roma until August.
That defiance and humanity is present in the neighborhoods where Roma are being forcibly removed in Europe today. See “Following the Removals” video.
About “Following the Removals” and the Cocoon series. From 2017-2019 I interviewed over 80 Roma both in The Numbered Streets neighborhood of Miskolc, Hungary and in Toronto, Canada where people from the neighborhood are fleeing. This became a performance installation, part of my Cocoon series on forced and voluntary migrations and the epidemics that follow. These performance installations are originally site-specific, enacted on the sites of the migrations. They then can become installations in exhibition spaces incorporating the walk-though sculpture, large scale portraits, the soundtrack, and often times snapshots and memorabilia from the site.
Good reads : The Romani Uprising in Auschwitz, 16 May 1944 by Michal Schuster, Museum of Romani Culture, translated by Gwendolyn Albert http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/the-romani-uprising-in-auschwitz-16-may-1944#.XsVU-dnAuUg.link
Rachid Arar, president of Open Table in the Goutte d’Or, telling me what time he is going to meet me later that day. Paris, 2014
When I heard that both Rachid Arar and Chaney Yelverton were busy making sure the people in their respective neighborhoods were getting enough to eat during the quarantine, I was not surprised.
Rachid is head of Open Table, a community organization in the Goutte d’Or area of Paris. Chaney is president of the tenant association of the Morrisania Air Rights Houses in the Bronx. Both men have a long history of building networks in solidarity with the people who live in their neighborhoods. Their organizations are made up in large part of local volunteers giving back. Both men were hugely supportive of Cocoon project when I worked in their neighborhoods. It gives some small measure of relief to know that they and thousands of others like them are doing the work of helping people at this time.
Rachid was featured recently in a short video from l’Humanité.
Chaney Yelverton, 2018, by Eric Etheridge
