Melanee Murray-Hunt
Changemaking is the ability to take a social innovation that appears as conceptual and transform it into something visceral, tangible and real. Or in other words, to pull something out of the realm of ideas and make it accessible to human connection in the form of a story with people with bodies, feelings, actions and words. So if there is an idea, for example, in the zeitgeist that poor people are suffering from environment classism and racism, what does that look like in people’s lives? Dramatizing the story of environmental racism/classism is what can bring messaging home better than pamphlets and diagrams and charts. If you see someone dealing with it in front of you, even if it is in a story, that can trigger more empathy and understanding. People might then be galvanized to look a little more closely, dig a little more deeply. They might want to take action to make changes. I am a big believer that the entertainment industry could have eradicated various forms of oppression a long time ago. But if the creators aren’t having discussions amongst themselves as well as the oppressed (and not just sanctioned tokens or yes-men), if they are protected by class and race and gender and nationality, then it’s hard to cure something if you don’t know it’s plaguing you, too. In any case, that is how powerful I believe art and changemaking together can be. It can change people more fundamentally, sometimes, than the acquisition of data and stats. Or be a very compelling delivery system for said data and stats.
Due to the nature of creating art, the artistic practice changes each day you engage in it, and with each project that is produced. I try to create something I want to experience or see, even if it is a difficult topic. I think most people know that you can’t write about socio-political ideas and keep it reverent and sacred. The carefulness comes in being accurate, not in shying away from tough subjects. And when I mean accurate, I mean specific, human, real. Like trying to write in the warts and irregularities rather than airbrush things — because that makes space for a more realistically loving look at the characters I am portraying. At the same time, I am not one to shy away from the fantastic, the uncanny, or even the comic. But the stuff that doesn’t seem “real” in my work, always comes from a real place, a real yearning born from both pain and hope. I have noted that a lot of pain is always accompanied by something absurdly funny and dissonant, so I don’t step away from that either.
I think most artists I know look at things a little “too” closely, they feel things a little “too” deeply. So the work always comes from that. People have told me to stop thinking so much or feeling so much or being sensitive or whatever that is. So my work doesn’t come from a numb place or a “let’s assuage the status quo” place. I think that is the general territory of artists and I am no different.
When I accepted the invitation to join the Artist as Changemaker Cohort the first year, I had no idea what was going to happen, but it sounded interesting and up my alley. I had created a movie that looked at a particular construction worker’s over-identification with racial hierarchy as an addiction (Race Anonymous). Before and after screening the film, I gave people psychological tests to determine how films can change innate, latent racism. I also re-imagined deity, because seeing deity as looking exactly like whoever is in power is also a really potent drug. So I was consciously trying to use art for social change, as well as to measure that change, so that we can understand just how deeply how what we see onscreen or read or listen to affects who we are and how we view and treat each other. And I have done other work before that and in the interim that reflects an art-as-change ethos. So I was asked to join after that.
It is an exciting cohort to say the least. It feels like one of those things that can only happen in the movies. You are in a room (a very cinematically lit one) with these artists of different backgrounds who are in the trenches trying to render a more beautiful world, even if the paths diverge into works that — celebrate, expose, lament, empathize, show the ugliness, the beauty, etc. And they are all diverse voices. Even though we might all have art-as-change in common, it isn’t necessarily an echo chamber. There was a lot of creative fiction as we designed the program and centred our community, Calgary in that. So all that was pretty exciting, an interesting story in and of itself. I came back for a second year, because of the impact of that first year as well as the fact that I am working with an amazing organization, Sagesse. Sagesse addresses issues of domestic violence and works with clients to overcome their experiences of said violence. The process of working with Sagesse on this subject has been a transformative experience for me. The topic we are dealing with, “coercive control” is really relevant to so many people- even if a person is absolutely certain they have never experienced domestic abuse, or know someone who has. The name of the project — a short, webisode series — is The Invisible Bruise. Working on this made me realize how many people are suffering and how many of us have been conditioned to accept forms of abuse that are not always that obvious. Indeed we live in a world where forms of coercive control are not only accepted but endorsed as a form of “love” or “romance” by our media. Many of us have unintentionally gaslit ourselves and other people about this form of abuse because the target of this form of violence may or may not show physical evidence of being violated.
We hope to change this.
For me, as a filmmaker, I do believe that stories do a better job of bringing things home than written explanations. We will post here where The Invisible Bruise can be viewed in the very near future.