Latipa Dizon
The Memory and Resistance Laboratory, or MEM-RES for short, is a multi-disciplinary research initiative that advances emergent practices for memory work in the twenty-first century. We live in moment of unprecedented crisis– settler warfare, extraction, and climate catastrophe– a moment when artists, writers, librarians, archivists, and teachers are being attacked, and entire ecosystems are being decimated. In this context, MEM-RES understands memory work as planetary in scope and transhistorical in dimension. Our mandate at MEM-RES is to develop living archives that attend to the care, nourishment, and well-being of multigenerational communities. Our work is grounded in an ecology of three programs: Media-Based Cultural Projects, Publications, and Community-Engaged Pedagogies. These three activities are intertwined and each understood as integral to our practice of memory work. This presentation will introduce MEM-RES through our ongoing media-based work with the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation. It will contextual our practice of filmmaking, creating a VR cultural center, multimedia installation, and publication of language reclamation alongside the questions of data, sovereignty, and governance that subtend all media making practice. It will share our desire to develop protocols for media-based practice that center indigenous data sovereignty and governance and that form foundational practices for community-engaged work in art and documentary.