Diane Fellows

TopoNarratives 1-4, and Living Among Rivers

“TopoNarratives” is a series of interconnected films exploring cultural and geo-political constraints or orthodoxies across diverse human geographies. The “TopoNarratives” series explores inter-generational perspectives of orthodoxy’s consequence:  migration and refuge, loss and remembrance, contestation and construction.

"TopoNarratives 1-4” is filmed in Berlin, Germany, where streets, buildings, and graffiti are juxtaposed against an interpretation of stories told to me by my mother, a survivor of Berlin during WWII, as I travel through places she once lived.

An essay "Erasure: Temporality and the Second Generation" written in connection with TopoNarratives 1-4 is published by the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. V 33 Issue 4, 2010

Selected Presentations:

2007 TopoNarratives 1-4: LottumStraße, Intermédialité, Théatralité, (Re)-Présentation et Nouveaux Médias (Intermediality, Theatricality, Performance, (re)-Presentations and The New Media), University of Montreal and LANTISS (Laboratoire des nouvelles technologies de l’image, du son et de la scene), Canada, (digital film, paper presentation)

2006 LottumStraße, Moses Mendelssohn Society Conference, Dessau, Germany (digital film)

                         ———————

Continuing work: TopoNarratives: Living Among Rivers”, a work in progress, situates narratives within varying size cells of the whole filmic frame. I explore visual and narrative means to connect events by dislocating the viewer from a continuous viewing / reading.

Within elements of “1-4”,  "Living Among Rivers" is an account of the landscape of Miami, Oklahoma where the indigenous Myaamia people were forcibly relocated from the American mid-west. In the 19th century, The Myaamia, whose homeland is eastern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, were placed on 480 square miles of unfamiliar Oklahoma land.  Miami, Oklahoma, and its environs contain the largest environmental Superfund site contaminated with lead and zinc mine deposits. The Myaamia’s story, framed by the control of physical ecologies and the forced near eradication of the Myaamia language, is part of the “TopoNarratives” larger discourse regarding orthodoxy’s political, cultural and environmental tenets affecting consecutive generations.