Olivia Camfield, Celeste Camfield, and Woodrow Hunt
Portland, OR
Osten Cetto : Four Snakes
World Premiere
Live score by Brett Marcom
Projection screens by Will Camfield
Access notes: This event has high sound levels. Earplugs will be available.
DESCRIPTION
Within Osten Cetto : Four Snakes, Olivia and Celeste Camfield explore the relationships between the body and shapes through tattoos, movement, and Mvskoke symbols. The film’s live noise score and dance utilize the repetition and layered imagery of the choreography and the film to create an immersive viewing experience. By offering movement to ancestors past and future, the sisters navigate how shape is translated between forms, such as sound, body, and film. Throughout the performance, the film acts as a landscape: the place and history that contextualizes this work, creates our stories, and holds our memories. At the center of the piece is the connection between two sisters, which propels forward to examine relations beyond colonial perception. The Alien then appears as a form of relation to the stars.
This performance will be accompanied by a film screening programmed in partnership with COUSIN Collective. Featured films:
Ulu Kupu (2022) by Tiare Ribeaux
Lore (2019) by Sky Hopinka
Everything I Say is True (2017) by Kite
Fighting Looks Different 2 Me Now (2022) by Fox Maxy
Rid (2023) by Olivia Camfield
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Olivia Camfield is a multimedia movement artist of the Muscogee Nation, born and raised in Texas Hill Country. Their work finds connection to dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism. They have performed and choreographed dance for much of their career, and their film work includes themes of the Alien as kin, time traveling relatives, and Mvskoke lifeways in experimental forms. They are a tattoo artist whose hand poke practice is based in Southeastern and Mississippian Indigenous tattoo traditions, creating designs for Southeastern people that imagine the possibilities of those tattoos in the future and the new shapes they may take. Olivia's films have screened internationally at Camden International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, and have appeared in print and online publications such as Artforum andVariety. Olivia is a 2018-19 Alembic Artist In Residence, a CYCLE I featured artist of COUSIN Collective, a 2022 Sundance Institute Indigenous Non-Fiction Intensive participant, and a 2022 recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s LIFT–Early Career Support for Native Artists award.
Celeste Camfield is a mixed Muscogee artist living on the settled land of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ Sookobitʉ (Comanche), Ndé Kónitsąąíí Gokíyaa (Lipan Apache), Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos peoples, currently known as Austin, TX. She works in the mediums of movement, film, and food. She grew up dancing in Texas Hill Country and studied dance at Marymount Manhattan College. Celeste has studied modern dance in Vicenza, Barcelona, Prague, at ImPulsTanz in Vienna, and was a participant in P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels, under the direction of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. She is a member of ARCOS and has performed with the company since 2019. Celeste has also performed original works with BLiPSWiTCH and Alexa Capareda. She has been creating and performing in experimental dance films since 2019, with screenings in Austin, Camden, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, and Portland. In 2022, Celeste co-founded Preheat Fest, a film festival that celebrates the experimental on camera.
Woodrow Hunt is a Klamath, Modoc, and Cherokee artist who was born and raised in Portland, OR. Woodrow's film practice is focused on documentary and experimental forms. His experimental work explores the functions and relationship between digital video and memory and the ways digital video can communicate issues related to the Native community. Woodrow’s films have screened at the Portland Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight, and other festivals internationally. His work has been featured in Artforum, Boston Art Review, and Hyperallergic. Woodrow is a featured artist of COUSIN Collective and was a 2022 Sundance Institute Non-Fiction Intensive Fellow.