Cecilia Cornejo is a professor of Cinema and Media Studies and a recipient of the 2020 McKnight Fellowship for Community-Engaged Artists. Through various documentary film projects and her most recent multidisciplinary, multimedia project The Wandering House, Cecilia examines notions of belonging and the immigrant experience while exploring the traces of historical trauma on people and places. I sat down with Cecilia to discuss the inspiration for her work and her plans for reciprocity as the project continues to expand in new directions.
How does this project connect to your previous film projects?
When I moved to Northfield, I was very aware of not belonging to this community. I had moved from Chicago where nobody cared what I looked or sounded like, and these differences became much more obvious in a small town. From the get go I started thinking about mapping marginality in a place like Northfield that looks so perfect on the surface. I found myself wondering about the people like me who don’t fit. This line of inquiry led to a film project with the skateboarders of Northfield about the process of getting a skate park in Northfield. That project led to a second more recent film that I made with the Latinx community, a community that has a strong presence in Northfield but that you don’t typically see. This film is called Ways of Being Home, and it traces the ways in which people make a home away from home. As you can see, ideas about belonging and home predated The Wandering House, which grew organically out of these past projects.
What is the concept of The Wandering House?
The idea of The Wandering House itself came with the realization that I didn’t want to jump into making another film just yet. I wanted to go through the process of asking a question, but this wasn’t enough. I felt like I needed to create a particular space in which questions about home and belonging could be asked. It was about creating a particular circumstance, space, and time that we need more than anything; a space for reflection where people can say what they think and how they feel without any pressure from someone like me asking the questions. In looking for a place, I eventually came to ice fishing, a very Minnesotan idea. It was perfectly symbolic for the project because I am literally trying to pierce through the ice and get to what’s underneath. Where I come from in Southern Chile we have these houses that are on stilts that give you that sense of mobility, so the idea of a mobile space that would create a sense of home as both a physical place and a metaphor made a lot of sense to me.
What is your vision for reciprocity in this project and future projects?
The project is done in terms of the collecting phase and now we are in the following phase which involves transcribing 36 hours of audio. I’m giving myself a year to actually unpack that and figure out what to do with these stories. I thought about making an archive, but the word archive already feels very dusty. I want to listen for points of connection in the recordings and hopefully give that back to the community in a way that people can relate to. As an artist, I can transform these testimonies and give them a shape that is more useful and accessible to people than having to sit and listen to hours of recording.
Several projects are already coming out of this, and my aim is for them to emphasize the continued participation of the community. One is a book and art project that we are going to put together with the residents of Laura Baker. We are meeting on a regular basis with residents to create a book of poems on the idea of home. Residents who are less verbal or prefer a different means of expression will be invited to make art that will be paired with the poems at a later stage. Another project is a collaborative embroidery project. One of the questions that people were asked to complete in The Wandering House was “I know I’m home when…” I am in the process of selecting these sentences right now, but ultimately, anyone from Northfield will be able to stop by Northfield Yarn and pick a sentence from the various responses and embroider it onto a quilt that conveys the idea of home. I am also doing listening sessions based on the work. I have already put a couple of sound collages together and people have reacted in amazing ways because the stories people brought to The Wandering House were truly extraordinary. In the act of listening to themselves and each other, people are going to find a lot of meaningful things to reflect on.
What were some unexpected challenges you encountered?
The biggest challenge is that I am a filmmaker, and right off the bat, this project was not a film. I had to ask myself, if this is not a film, then what is it? This project has helped me step out of my comfort zone and treat myself as an artist instead of just a filmmaker. In academia it is tempting to stick with what you know and film is my area of expertise, but I am trying to not let my expertise get in the way of doing what’s needed and what is right. I am a filmmaker but also an artist, and as an artist, I could see that this needed something else. I realized that I needed to make the act of asking the question the most central aspect of the project.
I was always told you have to think before you act. There may be some truth to that but that is not how I do things. I like to trust my intuition, and trust that at some point down the line I will realize why this was the right approach. This is the first time I’ve done something like this and it has been important to follow that intuition and give myself enough time to make mistakes and to learn from them. We have to experiment and try new things, which is always a challenge. I had to ask myself, are you going to keep doing the same thing you already know how to do or give yourself permission to try something and to fail? For me, that is what being a human being and an artist is all about; we want to play, explore, discover, and that is how I want to live.
What made this project possible?
I am very grateful for the support that this project received from Public Works, the Humanities Center, and the CCCE. Public Works was instrumental because there would have been very few other grants that I could have applied for to do a project like this as a filmmaker. Everybody loves the word interdisciplinary but very few people know what to do with it. Being an artist who is actually working between disciplines, having something like Public Works is tremendous because otherwise I would have not had the chance to play and experiment and explore. Because Public Works gave The Wandering House a chance to really become something, later on I applied and received a prestigious grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture to continue to develop the project. I also received tremendous support from CCCE and through its office was able to hire two student assistants, Sergio Demara and Arya Misra, who helped me implement the project in Northfield in summer of 2019.