On October 24, 2023, filmmaker and archivist C. Díaz visited Christopher Pérez’s class Writing from/for Inheritance at the Bard Microcollege for Just Community Leadership in Harlem. Díaz’s visit was themed around “unsatiated ancestral desires” and asked students to consider how their creative endeavors and writing work toward fulfilling their dreams, goals, and imagined futures. During class time on October 24th, C. Díaz screened a series of short films and talked about their work in home movie preservation and film archiving. They then led a filmmaking workshop, utilizing student writing from the semester and personal archives (photographs, video, objects) to create a collaborative film poem.  With the footage shot and directly animated, C. Díaz processed the film and digitized it at Mono No Aware Lab and returned the following week, October 31st, to screen the collaborative film poem and engage in a session of discussion and writing about the process of their time and work together.

C. Díaz is an interdisciplinary artist and radical archivist from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. Their work explores the relationship between cerebral landscapes and the natural environment through the weaving of social practice, experimental cinematic techniques, and the reimagining of archives. C. has worked on various film restorations, oral history projects, and home movie collections as a colorist, editor, and digitization specialist for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, NMAAHC at The Smithsonian, and The Estate of Ana Mendieta. In 2021, they co-founded ENTRE, an artist-run community film center and regional archive located in the Rio Grande Valley, where they hold roles as facilitator, programmer, and archivist. They serve on the board of the Center for Home Movies, a collective of archivists advocating for the preservation and cultural significance of home movies across the globe. They were an Interchange Artist Grant Fellow in 2021, awarded the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Grant in 2019, and an Artist in Residence at the Echo Park Film Center in 2016. They are currently an Assembling Voices Fellow at Columbia’s INCITE program focusing on Boca Chica, Corazón Grande, a community archival project facilitated by ENTRE and Flower Friends.