JOURNEY(S)
Transcription/ Translation/ Production Assistance
Description: Inspired by poet Ntozake Shange’s acclaimed choreopoem For Colored Girls, director/producer Saaret E. Yoseph sifts through her own cultural biography, creating a short-form audio series that follows the stories of Ethiopian women, who arrived in the District prior to or during the 1980s. An eclectic collage of language and movement, each episode of JOURNEY(S) is roughly 5-8 minutes long and paired with a video portrait dedicated to the Black feminine gaze. Visual source materials are spliced and reimagined, including advertisements, newspaper headlines and pictorials from the 60s, 70s and 80s, ripped from the pages of history and transformed for the anthology, in order to speak to the collective experiences of Black transnational women across the African diaspora.
Image by: SAARET E. YOSEPH
SAARET E. YOSEPH (she/her) is an Ethiopian-American writer and multidisciplinary artist. Her work has been featured by HuffPost, The Rumpus, The Root, The Washington Post, CNN and The Ethiopian Reporter. In 2014, Saaret premiered RED LINE DC, a master’s thesis-turned-documentary that explored gentrification and graffiti in her hometown of Washington, DC. She went on to launch various arts and humanities-based projects, in collaboration with HumanitiesDC, CommonLit, the Environmental Film Festival, and Meridian Hill Pictures, among others. In addition to her oral history project, JOURNEY(S), Saaret is also pursuing other narrative experiments and creative inquiries, including a poetry chapbook and a loosely-autobiographical feature script.
