ART + CULTURE + SOCIAL JUSTICE + MAPS
For over twenty years, I have worked within the filmmaking and photography industry, traveling the United States and Cuba to document the impacts of place on social justice, racial politics, and identity. Over the course of my career, I began to question the relations between my photography and their digital ties to place. How can environmental and spatial data effect the physical realities of place and memory? How can data address trauma, misuses of justice, to remap and reorient these events?
My work seeks to examine Amadou Diallo, Muhlaysia Booker, Sandra Bland, Gemmel Moore and the many other victims of police brutality, racial profiling, and sexual discrimination, to reflect on the landscapes of psychological terror these events manifest. I use cartographic technology, bioimaging, shapefiles, and geohacking to create and mold hybrid maps and intermedia forms that examine these permeations of violence through the lens of digital objects and living archives.
By examining place, you explore the community, city, state, and federal levels of cultural enforcement, expanding the regional effects of imbalanced economic systems and the data used to justify hegemonic political structures. We have a political climate that restricts and leverages data, location, and identity against minorities, and a digital culture where bodies of color become regulated to footage of violence.
-Sherie Weldon