Projection Workshop for Migrations of Many /  by Eric Etheridge

Here, Martial Buisson and I tested different surfaces for projecting Eric Etheridge’s formal portraits in Steelton, PA. This will happen in September 2023 as part of the night when my Cocoon Steelton The Migrations of Many is illuminated. In Steelton my hope is these portraits will be projected on a large working steel building. We didn’t have a building that size this summer. We had pine and maple trees. The formal portraits will project smoother on a building. This was part of last summer’s workshops.

Pine Tree Surface

The new-used projector

Maple Tree Surface

1st Edit of Steelton Interviews Finished! /  by Eric Etheridge

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.

Thank you so much to all the donors who gave to my Year-End campaign! /  by Eric Etheridge

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!

Cocoon - The Emergence of Historical Legacy /  by Eric Etheridge

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.

Romani Resistance Day /  by Kate Browne

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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. 

“Against a backdrop of rising right-wing hatred, we need to draw on that defiance and humanity.” Željko Jovanović

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