Ghost Listeners: Liza Zapol

Is there someone (family, friend, mentor, stranger, ghost) whose experience you want to preserve? How does one record, interpret, and convey the memories of others? Something which is deeply subjective and unknowable?

In this workshop organized by oral historian and screenwriter Liza Zapol, we discuss what constitutes the conditions to express past experience with as much fullness as possible. This will be an exploration of listening through experiments with questions; methods of evoking sensory, embodied memories; and brainstorming collaboration with narrators to form a memory object (transcript, audio, artwork).

Since 2011, Liza has been collecting testimonies and memories of individuals who have shaped Skowhegan over the years to create a collection of oral histories. These oral histories are used as a starting point for this workshop in order to develop and practice ways to record and activate memories in which the verbal is not always the focal point.

This workshop is free and open to anyone who is interested in oral history, especially as it relates to building new narratives around the work of artists and community archives.

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Liza Zapol is an artist and an oral historian. She creates sound, multimedia and performance on the themes of creativity, memory and place, using documentary methods. Liza teaches in the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University.

Photo: Liza Zapol interviewing Peter Ruta at Westbeth. Image credit: Julie Cifani Evensen.