Diana Heise Featured in Lemauricien (The Mauritian)

Original acrticle: http://www.lemauricien.com/article/la-video-recherche-diana-heise-memoires-laTranslated from French via Google Translate.Diana Heise, a native islander of North Hero, a small island on the east coast of the U.S., has returned to Mauritius after an initial stay of nine months as part of an exchange (Fulbright Fellowship). She continued her thoughts about how she should photograph or film on the forms of distribution and how to transform the fixed image to extend it. She has directed three short films: Rakont mwa, Rakont new, Caliban (video performance already projected to MFIs under a collective work), Le Morne Exhuming and a short video on Marclaine Antoine. All these videos mobilize a buried memory and weave stories about the colonial and post-colonial experience. Meeting with the American who has conducted research on Creole communities around the world and realized that these communities are related to slavery and indentured and they share the dance, music and poetry means for converting such situations of oppression.While walking on the individual and collective stories, movies Diana Heise for approaching social relations still marked by the operation of the slave system. For Diana, the working memory, legends, allows the defense of citizens' rights and symbolizes the quest for a just human society.Since it went on the field with a camera in Barkly, Morne, at Camp Levieux, or to Rodrigues, the American kept images as field notebooks are kept, to tap into the data, build an archive of information and come back with videos from his photography work. Sounds and raw images were tailored to be disclosed. Thus, there is a complementarity between the work of photography and video. Diana tells us that live performance as Caliban can, through the process of video, be transformed into a work that can be seen by everyone. It reminds us that Caliban, a character from Shakespeare's works, Aime Cesaire and Dev Virahsawmy (according to various versions of "The Tempest") was the subject of a video and live performance to symbolize the quest for a more just society . Today, this work resulted lasts 15 minutes. Three characters speaking in three different languages, kreol, French, English (referring to the old parts and the role of language in the colonial and post-colonial period) deliver an experience that allows you to learn from past experience.However, the video Marclaine Antoine compared to the history of Sega, shows a cut of this past, and how we can try to reconstruct traces of forgotten things. It then switches to the "historical memory". Exhuming in Le Morne (12m), a video made from an excavation project with Kris Seetah archaeologist and his research group, discusses the results of archaeological research. Diana told us that it can "make a deep map and give a Greater understanding." For her, the legend of Morne a feeling of freedom ("something people can Understand everywhere"). Then takes action to remedy the omission. Memory is of course located in geographical locations and objects, but it is mostly worn by individuals. The common past connects the members of a community together: the transmission of history through stories, video search, overcomes some shortcomings.Diana Heise has been appointed professor at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she teaches photography and video. The U.S. believes that the various forms of art and stories passed can help transcend the pain of the past and help create a better world.