Cycle Interactive Documentary Project by Dani Slabaugh

Below from Slabaugh's artist statement which can be found with more information including her background research and theoretical framework at her website: Cycle Video Project.

I came at this project knowing that the truth is a messy thing.Telling the truth is a near impossibility; it is always changing and it is never complete.

My own truth, of who I am and how the world is and should be has changed often in my life. My self-definitions have roller-coastered between privilege and oppression, margin and mainstream. This has brought into focus not only just how messy truth is, but also how subjective it is to where we stand in this world.

Through these blurry identities I have come to understand that telling my own truth, from my specific experience of the world, is as close as I can come as an artist and documentarian to telling The Truth. Sharing how I see and inviting others to do the same is as close as I can come to truly documenting how the world works. It is through writing and rewriting our own stories and uniting them with other’s that we make meaning of the world and our roles in it.

Ultimately, these stories through which we make meaning of the world, ourselves and our identities are tied to our land and its resources. What and how we consume, how we look, where we go, what we eat, and where we eat it, and how we move about our communities tell ourselves and others how much we earn, how we see ourselves where we are from, and who we find community, love, and solidarity with.

In my life I have traveled through this messy entanglement of environment and society on my bicycle, and so have many others who examine daily the power dynamics wrapped up in how we, as a society, relate to our environments.

I have begun to document this Truth – the story of human society and the environment, through our eyes. The story, however, is incomplete without your personal experience of environmental justice. Your story is part of this documentary, as much as mine, or any of the other commuters I have collaborated with. Your reflections and your relationships to self-determination, privilege, consumption, oppression, global injustice, ability, debt, healthcare, sweat, technology, and liberation are all key components to building a bigger story – a better truth

Sharing of yourself is intimidating.It takes courage to be honest. The facts are always changing- and so is your story. The installation is erasable – the story is impermanent: shifty and fuzzy edged. Nothing you write here will be set in stone. Nothing you draw will be held up as anything more than an artifact of a process you were kind enough to share with your community. Be loose! Take chances! Step outside your experience and push the borders of your worldview. You don’t have to walk away with another perspective, but I do hope you will empathize with another – maybe someone you wouldn’t normally talk to.

With that, I welcome you! You are the main event! Your experience is what matters here, wherever you are, we are all here to meet you at that point, not at some holy meditational place of pure wisdom. We are all imperfect, we are all messy, and we all think about much more than the weather.