A friend of mine came home from a recent workshop all excited. Her history is with NGO’s. She has travelled extensively and worked in a wide variety of communities. This workshop was part of a Masters in Participation, Power and Social Change at the University of Brighton. The workshop was on Participatory Video. The root of her contagious excitement, she told us, was located in the potential power she saw in the process and methodologies that underlie this medium. She genuinely saw how participatory video could be an effective agent for community-empowerment and change. To steal from my old friend Wikipedia, Participatory Video (PV) is a set of techniques to involve a group or community in shaping and creating their own film. The idea behind this is that making a video is easy and accessible, and is a great way of bringing people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories…This process can be very empowering, enabling a group or community to take their own action to solve their own problems, and also to communicate their needs and ideas to decision-makers and/or other groups and communities. As such, PV can be a highly effective tool to engage and mobilise marginalised people, and to help them to implement their own forms of sustainable development based on local needs.’

In the name of all that is great about sharing new knowledge, I am going to scan in the handout she gave me from the workshop which you can then download. PV Resources PDF

Below is a picture of Don Snowden. Some dude he was. Father of PV. Invented the Fogo Process. Not to be mixed up with  Don Snowdon, a Nevada based vendor of machine guns and accessories. One Don shot film, the other Don shot MP44 Sturmgewehrs.

Winter trick: (it was Sheena’s) Dry out your orange peels and using them for kindling for the fire. They go up in a second. And they smell good as.

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Do you know who is a gas woman? That Miranda July. She never fails to entertain me. She does more than that to be honest. She brightens me up a bit. If I was a younger man and living in a factory studio in NY, my moustache in its prime … !

Anyway, almost all of her projects are worthwhile. Her film, ‘You, Me and Everyone We Know’ (2005) is a little cracker. And you get to see the lady herself playing along side a very likeable John Hawkes. The kids in it are superb too. Never too cute.

Also I love the website for her collection of short stories - No One Belongs Here More Than You published by Scribner last May. Just ordered the books so will tell you how they go down.

There’s the collaborative public art project, Learning To Love You More which has been up and running since 2002. July runs this project with Harrell Fletcher. Participants accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and see their work posted on-line. This work then fuels a series of exhibitions and viewings.

I could go on. Instead I’m going to find a nice picture of her instead and throw it up here. She dresses a bit like my Sheena used to dress … she has those blouses with the tie things on the front. The silky ones. I miss her.

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