Anna Brody
Anna Brody explores the complexities of all kinds of love: romantic, friendship, familial. The love we don’t realize that’s always on our minds.
Welcome! Can you tell us about yourself?
AB: Hi thank you! I’m a neurodivergent and optimistic Aries living in Tucson, sliding through my last year in the Photo|Video|Imaging program at the University of Arizona. I make work about love because it is the only thing I care about, and I feel lucky and grateful to have finally figured that out. I use cameras to make art with extreme sentimentality and painstaking sincerity. I take myself too seriously, but have really funny friends who help me with that. My love languages are making food (is that acts of service? Gift giving? Both?) and physical touch. I’m good at working really hard in concentrated bursts and then relaxing and doing absolutely nothing for probably way too
long :)
Thank you for sharing your films :) Can you talk about the relationship between them? Them as a suite? Are more still coming?
AB: it's absolutely my pleasure! I have always been so happy to make art that is easily and arguably ideally shared and viewed online. I believe them to be very much in relation to one another, and to be considered together - the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the relationships in my life almost always guide me towards this level of inclusion and multiplicity. Most important to me is the abundance mentality - as long as I can reasonably maintain that, I feel in direct combatants with capitalism, which manufactures false scarcity. Relationships can affect one another negatively, neutrally, and positively, but I feel certain that most often the negative effects of one relationship on another stems from a scarcity mentality. SO, in that frame of reference, yes there is and will be more of this work! I'm so excited about the next two that I have nearly finished as they address friend love super directly, which is the most prevalent, transformational, and honest love I have in my life.
tell me everything you know is such an intimate portrayal of mother and daughter. It’s striking to see your mother dress you in a wedding gown as she speaks about her own marriage and how her idea of romance has changed over time. There is both a verbal and material transfer of knowledge.
AB: This transfer is of forever interest to me - how constructs of love and intimacy and fulfillment get transferred to us as we are parented, socialized, and drenched in media. How can we pick out what of these constructs work for us and which ones actually aren’t serving us at all? How can we lay it all out and look at the things we didn’t even realize we learned and say, ‘ok, this is good and helps me stand up for myself and maintain healthy boundaries, but this thing over here is actually just a completely irrelevant standard/requirement/expectation that ended up in my head and my heart and isn’t useful so now would be a good time to exorcise it.’
That material/tangible transfer of intimate connection is again visualized in tiny lightening. What questions do you lead with while you are working on these films?
AB: I ask myself questions about how love can be seen. How it can be enacted, manhandled, embodied, and practiced. One of my primary goals is to create a muscle memory within myself for how love is actioned - what, as bell hooks says, the verbs of love entail. And then get really really good at them. I use time, repetition and endurance to ask questions about faith and trust - about whether, even though watching these videos might end up feel like a waste of time, might trigger pain or feel alienating or irrelevant, the fact that you're still willing to sit down and try anyway means that you have used your trust muscled just enough to remind yourself that it's there if you forgot. And does that in itself make it worth it? Do you have to have learned something or is exercising resilience and non-logical curiosity enough of a payout? The line I tread when I edit is figuring out when it stops being a learning experience and starts being boring, confusing, painful, unresolved, or redundant. That is the line that relationships must tread as well, and I have to approach it just as intuitively.
Maybe even non-human relationships and involved here - because it does take trust and faith to get back in the ocean after being dunked, or to sleep outside after a snake crawled in your sleeping bag last time. This is possibly an absurd train of thought but here we are :)
The very sporadic and unpredictable movement of rotating around one another in worth it coupled with the sonic presence of breath, laughter, contact, and rest keeps the viewer on edge. We wait in anticipation for the final collision of both bodies.
AB: That anticipation is exactly what I hope to squeeze out of this video. worth it is a very simple allegory for falling in love, which Slavoj Žižek describes as "a permanent state of emergency," It is breathless, hilarious, terrifying, insular, there is no safety net, and you feel like the other person is suddenly very much in control of whether or not you feel happiness or pain. Then everything slows down, maybe you find a rhythm, maybe repetition creates a greater sense of security, maybe it eventually creates monotony - either way endurance is tested, and sometimes it is rewarded.
Casserole Recipe of the Week:
Mom’s Minestrone Soup
Once again, this is not a casserole. But it is all made in one pot. It’s getting cold and I’m craving my mom’s Minestrone Soup. The thing with mom recipes is sometimes they don’t come with steps or directions. So this is for you to figure out. When you do, you’ll never forget. xx
