I got back to the states this week with 120 minutes of recorded interviews, which is less than I expected (3 40-min interviews–I actually did a fourth but screwed up the recording), but they all touch on the themes that I was interested in.  I also traveled to Jonestown and recorded footage there.  I will post some mock-up videos next week to give a sense of what the walls of the installation might look/sound like.

It was an interesting anthropological experience, studying an extreme moment from my own culture through the eyes of another.  In a way we were looking at this strange cult phenomenon from a similar point of view, and it felt like I made a more immediate connection with my interview subjects through a shared interest.  More so than say if I were just studying the local culture.

From the interviews I recorded, some of the threads that interest me are:

1. The transitory nature of the land—the clearing of land for Jonestown, and later the clearing of Jonestown by fire.  I interviewed the man who was in charge of clearing the land (above–it’s almost a shame that I’ll only be using his voice, since he’s sitting in front of land that he was in the middle of clearing when I found him).
2. Guyanese appropriation of objects from Jonestown, such as plates, animal encyclopedias, bulldozers, natural remedy books, mattresses, poison darts and gold.  I would have loved to also photograph people with their objects, trace their paths, (which would have sent this project in another direction) but that never happened, they just talk about them.
3. The ambiguous portrait of Jonestown as painted by those who had close but only partial views of it.  Stories from Guyanese of interactions with and observations of specific Peoples Temple members, and their impressions of and rumors about the group as a whole, put together through glimpses from outside.
4. The cross-cultural strangeness of Americans bringing traditional African medicine to South America–another way in which Jonestown is a place of non-traditional geography.

I feel like these fit together in some way, in the sense that they explore how Jonestown landed like a UFO (as one local expat cafe owner put it), dissolved into the local community to the point where almost nothing of it materially exists, but is then recreated in an amorphous way through the local culture, stories, rumors, theories, and new uses for its found objects.

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