Bloodline: Book 1
Capstone Project for Archive Fever with Prof. Kim Bobier (SP ‘22)
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Hi, I’m Nande.
In the fall of 2019, I made a short documentary about my family called Bloodline. It’s centered around a conversation with my mom and an online family tree my uncle started in about 2009. While living in New York for school, I spent weeks asking my mom to scan photos from our home in Florida I loved seeing pictures and VHS tapes of me as a child, relatives I don’t remember meeting and my parents before they had me.
Being the first American-born in my family, I’ve always felt a distance between myself and Jamaica. A place I’d visit every couple of years for vacation but would hear stories about every day.
It’s been three years since making that documentary. The pandemic forever changed how I view my family and taking a gap year has informed my interests as an artist and what I want to spend my life doing.
In 2022, I’m starting to work on my senior thesis film, a sequel to Bloodline. I’ve become fascinated with archives and art books, and this book is my first attempt at gathering the digital photos, Ancestry family tree I’ve grown through digging around the internet, and other media that represent main characters and moments that influenced me to make this project.
This collage is from a child’s point of view, an incomplete puzzle with room to fill over time.
Enjoy!
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I'm focusing on a documentary I made in 2019 called Bloodline. My thesis film next year will be it’s sequel.
In the first film, I interviewed my mom about our family tree and used screen recordings of the online tree with pictures and VHS videos of my family and me as a baby. I'm not sure what story I want to tell for my thesis, but I became interested in genealogy and historical research in 2021. I've learned a lot about archives in this class, and have done some family research as well. I've been collecting things without focusing on what I'll do with them.
I'm thinking about using some drawings I made as a kid. Especially ones of my family, and adding actual pictures of my family to compare my child eyes and the camera.
For my 2019 documentary, I recorded a long conversation with my mom* about her dad's childhood, but it never made it into the final documentary. I think it'd be cool to take pieces of his story with photos of Jamaica that I found for Project 3.
*I no longer have that audio file but can interview my mom another time.
I've been a lover of zines since being a student at Pratt and want to make a physical archive for the last project of this class. I'm looking into making a pop-up book, something very handmade and DIY as if constructed by a younger me. I'm going to pick up a couple of books about pop-up books from the Brooklyn Library.
I'll try to focus on me, my mom, and my grandpa, maybe with a focus on place and work/school. My grandpa worked on a farm as a child and grew up separated from most of his siblings and his parents. From what I remember my mom telling me, he experienced colorism from his own grandparents. In illustrations and photos, I found at the NYPL, there were a number of anthropological images of mixed-race Jamaicans, Chinese-Jamaicans, and Maroons. I’m interested to see what kind of connections I can make with those images and text I’ve found on race and skin tone in Jamaica.
My grandpa was also a supervisor for a company called Alpart that mined bauxite/aluminum. As children, my mom and her siblings lived in a company neighborhood with other employees and their families. Most of whom were from the UK or the States. I think I’ve seen photos of her with a bunch of white kids and she’s told me that those were their neighbors. I think I can find pictures and ask her about it again.
I’m also interested in my mom’s experience going to a PWI in the 80s and the culture shock. My dad went to Howard and I think racism was even more shocking to him when he moved to Florida with my mom.
I didn’t intend to focus on race with this project but I think it’s a big part of me and my interests, and I didn’t mention it much in my 2019 doc.
I’ll be including bookmaking (pop-up books), photography, and illustration. I might use other disciplines but these will be the main ones. I want to use materials that I have or are easy to find. I don’t want the final design to be too complicated or maximalist.
