TERESITA CARSON VALDEZ

2023

Part essay film, part videopoem, Monolith braids found footage, documentary, experimental, 3D animation and narrative filmmaking devices to explore notions of collectivity, dissent, indigenous knowledge and time as a series of folds, splits, ruptures, loops, clusters, drifts, ascents, descents, vortexes, pulses, rhythms, linkages, aberrations, burials, and unearthings. This shape-shifting film addresses ongoing legacies of nationalist archives, archeology, and coloniality.

*This project is partially supported by an Individual Artist Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, as well as a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, a state agency through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

2023

Super 8mm

I approached this project as a performance—an embodiment of Josef Albers as a Modernist from a distant future. I went on excursions to discover the built environment in Chicago’s South Side. The main question became: “How would I, as an archeologist from the future, treat modernist ruins?” I took more than 1,000 photos, cut them up and arranged them in photocollages. I made abstract drawings by extracting the lines and forms suggested by the collages. Through a process of quotation, I aimed to recycle and break down an existing form, and to construct a new text, a counter-archive, with the debris. I took it even farther. I filmed the Modernist buildings, explored them with an induction microphone, and recorded their electromagnetic sounds. The result is a moving collage entitled, “Promised Land.” The manipulation of the moving image resulted in a new, productive form for me and expanded my understanding of cinematic movement through an ensemble of scores, abstractions, and rhythms. My intent now is to create experimental cinema of temporal, political and ecological agitation—one that creates and appropriates parallel sensory, perceptual, poetic and speculative structures within existing structures.

2021

Shot on location at Mitla, Monte Albán, and Oaxaca de Juarez, Oaxaca

Super 8mm (digital transfer)

Two women, one Indigenous, one mestiza, move through time and space occupying sites of oppression, resistance and liberation. Each image and sound element function as individual slipstreams. Native slipstream, a form of speculative fiction in sf, views time as pasts, presents, and futures as currents that flow together into a stream. Filmed on location in Oaxaca, Mexico.

2017

16mm, ink

Narrative short (2015)

2:20 min.

Super 8mm

Toñita learns to skateboard from a mysterious boy in her neighborhood.

2012

6 min.

Super 8mm

After being scolded one too many times, mischievous Toñita runs away from home. While on the road, she meets another little girl and together they embark on a frolic through the Mexican countryside. On their way to the rodeo, their fun is interrupted by a gang of bullies and what looks like a covered corpse in the middle of the road.

Narrative short (2023)

15 min.

Super 16mm/video

A couple wants to break up, but are unable to communicate. They both secretly plan their escape while remembering the beginning of their relationship.

2004