Public Service
Public Service is our new spin-off web zine launched in 2023. Inspired by Stuart Hall’s call to redirect media towards “the public service idea” to address diverse publics, Public Service retools the Internet as a space to foreground BIPOC artists, designers and storytellers. Each episode features conversations that highlight strategies and practices to catalyze radical change in the culture industries–and beyond.
Episode 2: Visions and Visionaries featuring Grace Wales Bonner and Antwaun Sargent with Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, Poly Styrene, and Edward Said.
The early work of acclaimed designer Grace Wales Bonner responded to how Black culture was addressed in fashion. The process of representation-as-translation, for Wales Bonner, draws from the modern African diaspora to suture—and propel forward—the histories of Black artists and intellectuals in African, American, and European cultures into something at once familiar and projective. When imagining new aesthetic approaches rooted in one’s identity and heritage, how might artists and designers of color engage in this endeavor by looking to history and collaborative modes of cultural production as resources? How can we imagine new sensibilities and self-definitions related to our layered, diasporic identities and histories with self-determination, complexity, and care?
This conversation was recorded in January 2023.
Credits:
Directed, edited and produced by Esther M. Choi • Graphic design by Studio Lin • Production assistance by Kapish Cheema • Music by Esther M. Choi. Archival images from @WalesBonner, walesbonner.net, and @SamanArchive. Closed captioning in English is provided.
Episode 1: A conversation featuring Angela Dimayuga, Andrew Thomas Huang, and Anamik Saha with Death Angel, Rob Allen, Christy Essien-Igbokwe, and Stuart Hall.
Representation doesn’t just matter for minoritized perspectives: it has a métier. The ethics of how we are made “seen” has great stakes. Erasure, whitewashing, cultural appropriation, and tokenism are forces that cultural practitioners of color have faced since the advent of the cultural industries as an extension of colonial rule. Rather than seeing these issues as mere symptoms of the logics of white supremacy, how intrinsic are these techniques to our existing systems of cultural production? From film to cuisine, what platforms and strategies can BIPOC cultural producers initiate to be seen and heard on our own terms?
Credits:
Directed, edited and produced by Esther M. Choi • Graphic design by Studio Lin • Production assistance by Kapish Cheema • Music by Esther M. Choi . Closed captioning in English is provided.