Accessibility Notes: The Tuba Thieves always screens with Open Captions. This event will include ASL interpretation.
In early November of 2011 tubas were stolen from a high school in Los Angeles. About a week later, tubas were stolen from a different high school. A month passed and tubas were stolen from yet another high school. This continued: twelve schools in Southern California had their tubas stolen between 2011 and 2013. When reporters told the story, they focused on the thieves and asked the same questions: Who is doing this? Why? What is happening to the tubas? They did not seem curious about what a marching band sounds like without the lowest sound. They did not wonder what the tuba players were now doing in class. No one asked what happens when sound is stolen or lost, owned or delegated. The Tuba Thieves starts from these questions. It is a film about listening, but it is not tethered to the ear. It is a film about Deaf gain, hearing loss and the perception of sound in Los Angeles – by animals, plants and humans.
Join us for a screening of a film in which the audience is a protagonist – our experience making sense of the film is the film. A moderated conversation between director Alison O’Daniel, who identifies as d/Deaf, and Occidental College professor Christina Aushana will follow the screening, with ASL interpretation.
“Ultimately, this film is a meditation on access and loss, and an investigation into what it means to steal, make, lose, own, protest against and legislate sound, and therefore inversely quiet and peace. The history of sound segregations is deeply embedded into the city through the design and mediation of sound. These choices declare an ownership over space and air, how sound travels through these substrates and who is allowed or obligated to hear it.” – Alison O’Daniel
Co-presented with the Occidental College Media Arts & Culture Department’s MAC Cinematheque series. Co-sponsored by the Oxy Disabled Student Union.
This event and exhibition are made possible by generous support from the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Alison O’Daniel is a filmmaker and visual artist. She has screened and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Centro Centro, Madrid, Spain; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Art in General, New York; Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France; Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia. O’Daniel is a United States Artist 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and has received grants from Ford Foundation; Sundance; Creative Capital; Field of Vision; ITVS; Chicken & Egg; SFFILM; Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation; Rema Hort Mann Foundation; Center for Cultural Innovation. She has attended residencies at the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Program; Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film and writing on O’Daniel’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine; Artforum; Los Angeles Times; BOMB; ArtReview. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
