(Bringing It Home)

Ella Pultinas and Megan Luke

From its beginning, we wanted it to be about Evergreen as an institution where supposedly we as students and faculty aim to, put simply, embody the “Five Foci” in our attempt to learn in ways that allow us to self-determine apart from the social structures and institutions that arrange our behavior into complicity. We also wanted it to be specifically about exercising our freedom to educate ourselves collaboratively. We were asking ourselves a lot of questions. Realizing that the idea of accountability itself can be taken in a lots of ways – the most common seeming to be about spending money ethically or voting – and that the issue of how to work towards ‘social change’ is complex and confusing, we wanted to reflect the need to really think about it both in our writing and our adaptation.

Footage for the video was largely taken while we were actually hanging out and walking, talking about these issues, which was nice because we wanted our video to reflect the practice of discussing, the general plurality of perspectives, and our time spent at both Evergreen and the places where we continue our learning experiences everyday. Spontaneity kind of took precedence over scripting. Only half of what we wrote ended up in our piece, unfortunately, and we also had to omit recordings of conversations and footage from an interview we had last week with activist/writer Kenyon Farrow due to the 7 minute limit.