What I Want My Words To Do To You...

Inspiring, captivating, and powerfully moving, this project illustrates the amazing possibilities participatory artistic production can embody. I really enjoyed listening to how all of these stories developed and were finally produced. Perhaps what was most compelling about this project is how real it was. Even though these women were living lives to which many of us could not relate, trapped in a prison of metal, concrete, and immeasurable guilt, there was something uniquely human about their stories and the ways they interacted with each other. The project really highlighted for me how insignificant categories like race, gender, age, and class really are.

In addition, something I've struggled with throughout the semester, but especially during our class with Adam Frelin, was this sort of spectrum of participation. It seems to me that somewhere on that spectrum lies a very unfortunate form of participation that somehow legitimates exploitation, acceptable simply because it's called "artistic." However, this film definitely laid outside of that characterization for me. Despite a rather obvious power disparity between the two groups of women (the women in prison and the women who were acting and writing) it seemed like that dynamic was transcended in the process of production. Both emotionally as the women shared their stories and then also literally when the actresses performed these pieces for the other inmates. It was quite amazing to see how touched all of the women were to see these very successful actresses perform and give voice to their stories. It seemed that these women were speaking through the actresses and in the process both sharing that voice with their fellow inmates, friends, and family and also legitimating that voice, proving that it really matters.