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The Sum of Our Parts
An experimental video portraiture project
This film project proposes a series of experimental multi-channel film portraits structured around the appearance of the quilt. The first quilt square is complete—a self portrait. We move outwards from ourselves to explore an extended network of queer kinship through these portraits: starting first with our own queer loved ones, then their loved ones, and onwards in expansive community.
The Sum of Our Parts | Film I (Self Portrait)
2025
We draw associations to Margot Anne Kelly’s framing of the quilt as a strategy to explore and celebrate fragmentation of identity, as she articulates in her essay, The Color Purple and the Poetics of Fragmentation: “The self she is creating, like the patchwork quilt she makes, is not so much an integrated whole as it is a vindication of fragments, a commemoration of multiplicity” We are interested in how the medium of film can uplift the fragmented self while drawing associations to the connection, mending, and relational attachments of one’s personal and more broad community and sense of place. This piece centers queer identity as communal, political, ecological, personal.
The quilt structure used for each video portrait: a handmade design combining the Flying Geese and North Star motifs.
This project utilizes nine channels of video to capture this patchwork of identity. The video used in each channel ranges from home videos, protest recordings and archival footage, field recordings in nature on-site of the subject’s home or previous homelands, interview or video clips of the subject’s close relationships, tracking shots, and close-up clips of fabric and textures from the domestic space of the subject.
The goal of this project is to convey documentary film less by perceived precision or accuracy of image, and more through an ethos of representation concerned with how queer identity and multiplicity is felt and embodied. As Barbara Hammer puts best in Politics of Abstraction, “We are radically changing people, and we cannot reproduce that radicality using conventional forms.”
If you are interested in supporting the project, either as a portrait subject or as a donor, please contact me at: tinarosemeister@gmail.com
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