Join us for a screening of Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt in conjunction with Womxn in Windows: home—land.
A lyrical, decades-spanning exploration across a woman's life in Mississippi, the feature debut from award-winning poet, photographer and filmmaker Raven Jackson is a haunting and richly layered portrait, a beautiful ode to the generations of people and places that shape us.
Introducing the program will be 2,340 Miles from 1880, a short film by interdisciplinary artist researcher Zion Estrada. Inspired by close readings of archival material on plantation worker strikes preceding the Great Migration, 2,340 Miles from 1880 stages an abstract meditation on Black work stoppage as a recursive and aesthetic practice, through found video, archival papers, photography, and original soundtrack. A visual and sonic meditation on Black strikes and the Mississippi River as a flow of Black rebellion, this piece of cinema-as-archive-as-monument layers words and objects to speculate events that moved between Louisiana and Chicago.
Raven Jackson is an award-winning filmmaker, poet, and photographer from Tennessee. Her work often explores landscapes of indefinable experiences and emotions, intimacy, connection, and the body’s relationship to nature. Recently nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature and a Gotham Award for Breakthrough Director, Raven’s debut narrative film, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, made in partnership with Maria Altamirano, PASTEL, and A24, world-premiered in the US Dramatic Competition at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and was named one of the top ten movies of the year by The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and RogerEbert.com. The film has screened at the New York Film Festival, San Sebastián International Film Festival, BFI London, AFI Fest, and more. She has served as a Story Editor for HBO's adaptation of Sula, based on Toni Morrison's novel, and co-wrote an episode of the Apple TV+ Series Surface. A 2024 Sundance Momentum Fellow and Rideback Rise Resident, her short films Nettles and A Guide to Breathing Underwater are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. Stories From a Place Where All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the companion book for her debut feature, is currently out from A24. Her photography can be found in the book, as well as in BOMB Magazine. She is a Cave Canem fellow and holds MFAs from New York University's Graduate Film Program and the New School's Writing Program. Her chapbook of poetry, little violences, is available from Cutbank Literary Magazine.
Zion Estrada (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist researcher. Her work flows between archival assemblage filmmaking, sonic collage production and experiential design centering human and more-than-human (re)connection.
Zion’s experimental collage language in film and sonic works often use layering of field recordings, found sounds and carefully curated sound clips that score a line of discourse that complicate temporality, history and meaning making. Her practice is informed by the palimpsest and Pauline Olivero’s Deep Listening. She is most interested in the non-verbal and more-than-human qualities of storytelling from the African diaspora (specifically the Caribbean) and how sounds hold the spirits of the past and the alchemic power to magnetize communities, movement, moods, and healing. She draws from the traditions of Black Trans abolitionists care making, sex worker solidarity, doula presence practices and movement architects love of release. Zion is currently researching traditional forms of care and pod practices and repair as they relate to mangrove and wild grass systems.
Zion is the Creative Director of Black Discourse, co-founder of Wild Grass Design + Research Practice and owner of BZE Consultant LLC. She holds a M.A. Ed focused in participatory research and linguistics.
This program is organized by Justen Leroy, Director of Public Programs and Community Outreach, and Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
