In the past few weeks the world has lost three incredible people and their passing brings both the fog and clarity of grief. It is strange to lose multiple people at once and to hold and feel these distinct, but interconnected collective losses. I’m finding the griefs are bringing forth profound senses of knowing, purpose, connection and love.
Senior Arrernte Elder Dr M.K. Turner OAM, cultural professor, teacher, educator and knowledge holder, passed away on 5th July. I learnt the news while I was visiting my dear friend Kat and her children. Kat and I lived with each other on Arrrente Country for fifteen years and her connection to the Turner families is deep. It felt powerful to be together when we heard. Last night I dreamt I was walking on pale crunchy dirt on a track surrounded by thousands of people at the Telegraph Station for MK’s state funeral - which is next week in Mparntwe. I can’t be there, but I am certainly there in spirit.
Lawyer and advocate Sophie Trevitt passed away on 27th July. Sophie and I were connected through many people, but it was Em Frank who insisted we meet for a cuppa in Alice. When Dujuan and his family identified juvenile justice as a key area for change as part of the In My Blood It Runs impact campaign, Sophie was the first person I thought we needed to collaborate with. Sophie worked with our impact team directly and then through her role leading Change the Record. Her fierce sense of justice, her love of the bush, her writing and her campaigning will be deeply missed. As her friends and colleagues write in this beautiful tribute Sophie’s ”indomitable spirit and deep commitment to equity will continue to shape the world she left behind.”
And then just a few days later another force of nature, rockstar strategist and documentary film world field builder Jess Search passed away in London on 31st July.
Jess Search, co-founder of Doc Society helped coin the name for my practice - impact producing. I met Sophie Trevitt while living on a Arrernte Country when collaborating with MK Turner and her extended family through my role as an Impact Producer on In My Blood It Runs.
All three were driven by love, joy, desire for change and visions of justice. Today I am sharing my reflections on losing Jess, but it’s not written in isolation of my memories of Sophie or MK, but is of course, like everything, entangled.
I've recently started a PhD in impact producing - it's practice-lead and the new climate film that Maya Donna and our Unquiet Collective team are developing will be part of the research.
I've been reading widely trying to find a way to frame the dynamics of impact producing - beyond the ethics of how we make the content and before the audience reception, the place of strategy, communications, partnerships and collaboration with community and participants that makes the web and weave of this work.
A friend (photographer Jesse Boylan) put me on to feminist physicist Karen Barad and their notion of agency as not something existing in individuals, but instead to be understood as existing through relationships and what they call intra-action*.
As I process the loss of Jess Search I am struck by Jess's amazing work of intra-action - of her ability to recognise and accelerate entangled agency. Not just between herself and others but between others and others, connecting, convening, introducing, listening. A network weaver, an agent of entangling.
I met Sandi DuBowski at the Crossover Labs in 2009 and this is where I first discovered there were others like me out there, working at the intersection of film, art and change making and that there was a growing field and practice coming in to focus. Through Sandi I discovered Working Films and BRITDOC (now Doc Society). (Side note of timing in the way of loops, I met Working Films as they were facing the loss of founder Robert West and this makes me draw breath now).
I applied for a Churchill Fellowship to explore film and change practices worldwide in 2012 which I undertook in 2013. Between applying and undertaking the fellowship in 2012 BRITDOC had held a retreat on Osea Island, UK and along with practitioners who attended had coined the term impact producer. London was my first stop on the Churchill (which I combined with brokering the relationships for the Namatjira family to visit Buckingham Palace alongside the show's tour to London in 2013). I emailed the brilliant Beadie Finzi to introduce myself and subsequently hotdesked out of BRITDOC's offices for 6 weeks, absorbing, listening, learning, connecting.
There's so many moments rushing back to me -- Good Pitch Chicago, cocktails at CPH DOX, japanese dinner in Sydney, raves and ideas at IDFA, texts over whatsapp working out strategies to intervene in the terf narratives, dancing to Peaches in a Sundance condo, so many memories of Jess and the networks she has woven.
She did of course, not weave these in isolation and I honour too the wisdom of Beadie, Maxyne, Sandra, Megha and Shanida and the extended Doc Society team in unleashing all of this beauty and power and networking and entangling. I am also thinking of Sandi, Jennifer, Brenda, Nancy, Lina, Ingrid, Justine, Joanna, Sonya, Molly, Hollie, Sahar, Judith, Rebecca, Pamela and Paco and so many other wonders I have met and loved through these networks.
I am grieving not just Jess, but also her commitment to struggle. Oh how we need joy and strategy and vision and struggle. The work will continue, the struggle will continue.
I promise Jess - and Sophie and MK - I will triple down on my commitment to justice.
To continue to listen and learn, and to share everything,
I will listen for signals, not noise, I will connect, I will remain curious and I will be brave.
My deepest love to everyone weeping and mourning across our entangled networks as we weave stories and strategies for justice.
Love and solidarity forever, Alex
There are many wonderful legacies of thought, writing, films and more from each of these three to be found online, here are a few;
Wonderful spotlight conversation with Jess at London Film Festival.
One of Sophie’s many amazing op-ed’s in the Guardian on the injustice faced by young Indigenous kids in the N.T.
MK’s book Iwenhe Tyerretye: what it means to be an Aboriginal person.
*Intra-action is a concept introduced by Karen Barad. It describes the mutual constitution of entangled agency, that is the mutual constitution of our ability to act. When two entities intra-act, they do so in co-constituitive ways. This means that agency is not a preexisting given. The ability to act emerges from within the relationship not outside of it. And this ability constantly changes and adapts according to processes it is involved in. From http://makecommoningwork.fed.wiki/view/intra-action