Alida Walsh Project

Silence is not absolute, because matter vibrates as a fact of it's existence. Silence only names a quality of refused rationality, refused sociality, which is to say refused intimacy. So it's not so much silence as it is the ghost, the ghosting, of severed connection, a renunciation of the possible in the service of coherence of normativity. Such ghosting is the presence of loss. - Ashon Crawley

In early 2017, while researching my family for an entirely different project, I discovered a relative of mine whom I never knew about. Alida Walsh was a queer feminist experimental filmmaker and artist who was active in the late ’60s and ’70s in New York City. Discovering her existence led me on a research journey to her archives at Smith College, to Florida to meet her sister (another relative I had never met before), and to talk more deeply and intentionally with my dad about his family and memories. I quickly learned that Alida was a contemporary of my father. They grew up blocks from each other in South Shore in Chicago but never met.

Between my family’s silence about my aunt Susie—who died by suicide before I was born and who was also a lesbian—and this newly discovered relative, I found myself in a winding narrative of queerness and silence, ghosts and grief, memory and myth, and mysteries of severed ties.

This project will showcase recently digitized experimental films of Alida Walsh, alongside and accompanied by multiple pieces of original improvised music composed by Kate Walsh. A mini-zine will give context to the story, and a small panel of film experts will situate Alida Walsh's work within the feminist film tradition. These pieces will explore themes of presence, loss, decay, and time.

- Kate Walsh