Staring at the Dark is a socially engaged documentary film and community project about Black ancestral and contemporary landscapes in the age of climate catastrophe. Incorporating oral histories, digital projections, and sculptural installations of rebuilt sites now lost, this project reveals the unseen as a way of practicing sustained care and illuminating the spirit of revival in Black communities.

 About This Project

This project was inspired by my experience during the pandemic spending stay-at-home orders with family in my hometown of Panama City, Florida. While working on multiple community focused projects in Chicago, I was also becoming reacquainted with my hometown, a place in Florida’s coastal panhandle where just over a year had passed since Hurricane Michael damaged or destroyed entire neighborhoods across the city. When the national media coverage vanished after a few days, record numbers of people were still navigating the crisis for months; and many still do today. 

As a socially engaged artist, I started collecting stories from community members about the experiences, memories, and absences they were feeling across the hurricane-ripped landscape. I focused particularly on Black residents and their descendants, beginning with a historically segregated community called Bay Harbor on the east side of town near the papermill. Five years after the hurricane, the Bay Harbor community continues to mourn the loss of people and places that once were reminders of everything they built together when rural land workers migrated to urban centers to work the timber and chemical refining industries. This community grew to provide care for every aspect of Black life from spiritual gatherings and civic organizing to entertainment and domestic life.

I decided to develop Staring at the Dark as a community archiving project and a landscape documentary film as a way to tell the story of African American migration in Florida and post-disaster community resilience. The film will use video, digital projection, sculpture, and installation to construct the narratives of six local sites in Bay Harbor. I will recreate buildings from each of these sites in the form of miniature sculptures made of sugarcane paper, a process which is meant to reveal the complexities of rebuilding places and community archives after long standing historical inequities: from housing displacement, to school closures, and environmental racism. We will invite residents to participate in workshops on communal storytelling, family photo and home movie collections, and post-disaster resilience building.

I am working with Imani Nikyah (she/they), an award-winning filmmaker born in Louisville, Kentucky, who shares an interest in histories of Black culture in the South and the African diaspora. My dad, John Gipson, is also an important collaborator. His relationships with his siblings, cousins, church family, neighbors, and childhood friends ground the work in community building after Hurricane Michael. He is also knowledgeable about growing food, and he planted the sugarcane for the project. We are working to build local partnerships with the county library, higher education institutions, organizations, and local artists, educators, and public officials about integrating this project into larger efforts in the area to preserve African American history and culture.

Many elements of this project are already underway, and the overall budget will exceed $150,000. Thankfully, the film was selected for the 2024 Creative Capital award which will provide significant seed funding and development support. However, we need to secure additional funds and community-member investment to make this project as successful as possible. Our hope is to galvanize support from our southern and Chicago networks. Our timeline is to film in Summer 2024 with the goal of completion by Winter 2024. Once the film is fully edited, my dream is to bring it to Chicago audiences along with meaningful conversations around the Great Migration, racial justice, and environmental justice topics that are important for us all.