clara pérez medina

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and a practicing filmmaker and photographer. I create community-based research film projects that investigate questions of memory, place, and belonging. I combine my training in oral history, archival work, and community-based research methods with my more than ten years as a practicing photographer and filmmaker to address questions of space, political-economy, race and gender, and film production. My work is generously supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues Graduate Fellowship, the John L. Simpson Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the Social Sciences Research Pathways Program.

My dissertation, titled “Racial-Gendered Aesthetics of Rupture and Care: Visual Imaginaries of Oakland and Berkeley, CA through Photographic and Film Production,” examines visual archives of photo and film which I produced in collaboration with two community-based organizations, La Peña Cultural Center and Moms4Housing (in collaboration with the Dr. Brandi Summers-led Archive of Urban Futures project) – each of whom engage media projects to preserve their cultural heritage and defend their historical spatial claims to Berkeley and Oakland, California, respectively. Drawing on mainstream media portrayals of these organizations, I examine the production of dominant political imaginaries of displacement and rupture alongside the counter struggles which communities wage in their organizing work and visual productions. I argue that images assert a visual argument about who exists where (a conception of the past) as well as who will exist where (a statement of the future) – offering deeply spatial, but also uniquely visual questions.

My dissertation asks: What are the aesthetic, narrative, and spatial techniques in community-based filmmaking that reveal practices of community preservation in the face of displacement? My research broadens the range of methodological tools we have to investigate the place-making practices of communities to name harm, offer tools of remediation, and put forth a vision of longevity. By attending to the place-based visual imaginaries of art practice and housing justice organizing through the methodologies of collaborative film practice, I bring attention to visionary practices of preserving communities in place: housing as a human right, livable career paths as artists, cultural spaces with longevity, and safe Black and Latinx futures, which would mean a transformation of the broader conditions that endanger us all. I produced two short films and associated photographic archives with my community partners based on multi-year visual ethnographic fieldwork to help retain a sense of continuity and home. I examine these visual texts as sites where these two organizations articulate alternative visions of belonging and of care that trace both the conditions of domination and possibility of Black and Latinx communities.