Does it need subtitles?

Incorporating travel and interviews into my work was a new way of working for me, as most of my work is interactive or game-based. It was good to get feedback from the lab, although the conversations seemed to die out after the first few weeks. It was especially helpful to have expressed my ideas in writing before traveling to Guyana, as it was easy to stray from what I initially felt the project should be. At the moment the final product seems to be leaning more toward short video, but I imagine I will continue making several more versions after this.

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.

In one room, each wall is covered with projected video.  The video is of the empty field in Guyana that used to be Jonestown, where the Peoples Temple massacre occurred in 1978.  The video will be from the perspective of someone standing in the center of Jonestown, looking out in each of the four directions.  Each video will be a five minute loop of the daytime landscape.  The sound in the center of the room will be loud nighttime jungle sounds from Jonestown.  There will also be speakers by each of the walls playing audio from interviews I conduct with local Guyanese about their interactions with members of Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, whom I will be in Guyana interviewing from May 31st to June 15th.

The night sounds in the center of the room hint at the “white nights” where Jim Jones gave his most paranoid and apocalyptic views of the outside world.  The loudness of the night sounds will also force the viewers to approach the different walls in order to make out the content of the audio interviews.

The selections from the interviews will make few overt references to Jonestown or Jim Jones, but will be referring to a specific community, in an isolated place, which may be where the viewer is standing.  Selections from the interviews may also focus on communities in flux in the Jonestown area, as this is a region of mining communities with transitory populations, and Jonestown itself has also had several different groups of inhabitants that came after the Peoples Temple.

One goal will be to illustrate the small surrounding towns as living entities that we come to know through the jumping-off point of Jonestown.  The mass suicide is often the first and last thing someone from the U.S. thinks of in relation to Guyana, as if the events happened on a deserted island.  I am interested in the small, nondescript port, mining and border towns in developing countries, the types of places rarely read about.  I lived at a border town in West Africa for two years, and my subsequent work was influenced by meeting people and hearing their stories, my glimpses into their interesting lives.
Rebecca Moore, author of Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple, writes,

Sociologists argue that we can understand new religions such as Peoples Temple, as operating in a dynamic relationship with the world outside the group.  To consider internal factors apart from external factors does not tell the whole story of a new religion.  The interaction between members and outsiders helps to determine group attitudes and behavior, just as the interaction between members and their leader shapes beliefs and actions.

We know that Peoples Temple members sold their crafts at local markets, competed in basketball tournaments in Georgetown, and were closely-aligned with certain Guyanese political figures.  The only stories we hear, however, are from survivors, ex-members and those who interacted with the community from the U.S., never the accounts of those most geographically close.

I will arrive in Georgetown, the capitol, in early June, then take a plane from Georgetown to Port Kaituma, which is three miles from Jonestown.  From there I will visit surrounding towns such as Matthews Ridge and Arakaka, as well as Jonestown, itself.  I will spend two weeks in the towns, getting to know people and gathering interviews.  I have made contacts with locals, a man in Georgetown who has recently given me the contact information for a Port Kaituma resident who had interactions with Jim Jones, an aid worker from the U.S., as well as managers of a guest house in Port Kaituma.  Interviews will be video and/or audio recordings with accompanying photos.  Photographic documentation will include views of peripheral towns as well as remnants of Jonestown.  The precise geographic location of each interview will be noted by the GPS device and added to Google Earth via Placemarked links using the KML file format.