Echoes Of An Old Exchange—In Collaboration with Terri Jones* (2024)
In collaboration with Terri Jones*
At Terri’s family Thanksgiving meal, Terri and I challenged ourselves to engage in a physical, visual, and verbal conversation about race. Through the act of masked performance, and the subsequent conversations it provoked, Terri and I confronted the ways in which many of our perceptions of each other and our worlds are informed by internalized oppression, generational trauma, and inherited beliefs. Embodying these past, present and future ghosts together and deconstructing their roots, we work towards deeper recognition of each other, ourselves and the relationships that structure our lives.
*Statement on collaboration: Vera Weinfield and Terri Jones
Terri Jones and I began our collaboration in September of 2023. Our process has been collaborative from start to finish beginning with conversations in which we shared, analyzed, and investigated individual research, experience, family histories and myth. As our characters, narratives and settings began to form, we created our own masks for the performance and took turns staging, filming, and editing. We performed and filmed multiple days and our narrative took shape through planning, improvisation, and in our editing process. We receive equal credit as directors for this project.
This collaborative process has challenged both of us to confront difficult subject matter, work through disagreements in vision and style and attempt to understand each other’s perspective. It has been an act of sharing, an act of recognition and an effort to create new forms of relating based in honesty and care that seek to surpass many of the same historical relationships we are investigating.