THE CENTER AWARDS: EXCELLENCE IN MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING AWARD: ROBERT PLUMA
Congratulations to Robert Pluma for being selected for CENTER’s Excellence in Multimedia Storytelling Award recognizing his project, Hidden Histories of San Antonio. The Excellence in Multimedia Storytelling Award recognizes outstanding storytellers using lens-based media to create narrative-driven projects. The award is open, but not limited to, photography, video, new media, photojournalism, installation, and web-based works. Projects that inspire social action, document crucial issues, and amplify underrepresented voices are encouraged to apply. The Award includes a Mentorship, Complimentary participation and presentation at Review Santa Fe, Group Exhibition of Award & Grant Winners at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, Project Publication in Lenscratch & Feature Shoot, and inclusion in the CENTER Image Library & Archive.
JUROR: David Barreda, Senior Photo Editor, National Geographic shares his thoughts on this selection:
Robert Pluma is the recipient of the 2024 Multimedia Award. His project, Hidden Histories of San Antonio, reexamines the stories many thought we knew and shows how our understanding can be significantly deepened when viewing them through a different lens. At its best, multimedia can engage the audience to understand a story in a deeper, more profound way, and Pluma’s project interweaves his own family’s story with portraiture, testimony, and 3D scanning of primary objects to retell this historical narrative in a fresh way. Hidden Histories of San Antonio was in some ways the most ambitious project submitted from a multimedia perspective, but what drew me into it was seeing how Pluma’s explanation centered the participants—the most important part of any narrative.
It was refreshing to review many of the other projects submitted. A few that could revive honorable mentions are: Kathleen Tunnell Handel’s Where the Heart Is: Portraits from American Trailer and Mobile Home Parks for it’s structured visual approach combined with video interviews of the residents, Shantré Pinkney’s Raw, Black & Blue for her ambitious fictional love story told through a variety of media, and Matthew Finley’s An Impossibly Normal Life, which contemplates revisiting history again in the present. I do hope that Mr. Finley will be able to reimagine the physical space and bring his project to a fresh audience in a way that allows them to contemplate and engage through this created space.
Robert Pluma is a multidisciplinary artist, documentarian, and creative technologist dedicated to creating intimate, sensitive work to confront inequity and challenge power. This work exists to generate shifts in perspective, examine our capacity for empathy, re-center the outliers, and corrode barriers resisting our ability to act. His practice extends beyond traditional media, reaching deeper into our physical and virtual worlds. He use any means necessary to communicate and connect: photographs, moving images, written words, augmented reality, field recordings, ambient soundscapes, mixed-media sculpture, and electro-mechanical installations.
Pluma is an educator who has worked with a diverse range of ages, identities, and classes, leading workshops for elementary through high school students and teaching my his curriculum as a professor at Rutgers and Duke Universities. He works with archives in my his practice and in support of others, as with the Tim Hetherington Trust when he created an archive of every page of Tim’s work notebooks. He is a Coahuiltecan, Tejano, and Mexican-American Indigenous Futurist. He recently relocated from New York City, his home of decades, to Seattle. Pluma is a Magnum Foundation Grantee, Tow Knight Scholar, Reality Hack Grand Prize Winner, and sound + video editor for the Tribeca Film Festival category winner *Sandy Storyline*. His work has been featured in exhibitions, film, print, broadcast, and digital media, including National Geographic.
Follow Robert Pluma on Instagram: @robertpluma
Hidden Histories of San Antonio
Hidden Histories of San Antonio is a reclamation of the identity and narrative of my Coahuiltecan Indigenous ancestors – a counter-history to colonial accounts of what is now southern Texas. It will use augmented reality, mesmerizing slow-motion portraiture, and recorded oral histories. It is a deeply personal, research-driven effort to challenge the very notion of history and how much truth we can expect to receive from its authors. An augmented reality mobile application will open a portal into non-linear exploratory storytelling, allowing participants to discover interwoven tales of migration, religion, colonization, and resilience, one fragment at a time.
I propose the creation of a site-specific visually driven augmented reality application centered at Mission San José, a UNESCO World Heritage Site my ancestors were coerced into building by Spanish colonists. It will include a more expansive look at the region’s history and present oral histories of the recent and distant past. It will also include expert testimonies, archival records, significant information about specific locations, and 3D scans of artifacts. This will enable participants to encounter an essential retelling of the history of my people through an accessible, engaging, and revelatory experience.
In most historical examples of cultural erasure, there remain fragments of the people – symbols, songs, some words. The last generation to have lived on mission land will be gone soon – what do they remember which has never been recorded and will be forgotten if we don’t ask them? How can we visualize the memories of our ancestors? – Robert Pluma
Watch the project video – Hidden Histories of San Antonio Slow-Motion Video Portraits
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