2015 Interdisciplinary Arts & Media MFA program alumna Sid Branca is an unstoppable force. She has many projects in progress, and we were able to catch up to her to find out more details about what is coming up on her agenda.
She currently teaching Media Practices: Moving Image at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with co-teacher Snow Yunxue Fu. The class is a core course for the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department, and instills enthusiasm for various moving image forms, including video art, stop motion animation, and new media installation. The class has both lecture and studio components: the students make a project for each section and then choose a form for their final.
In May 2016 Branca will be spending a month in rural Finland at the Arteles Creative Center in a neo-future themed residency that attracts a variety of international future-oriented artists and creators. She plans to use the space as a drastically different environment to contemplate alternative futures and what the role of technology, nature, and the human body will be. This will be Branca’s first trip to Scandinavia; she has been making work up until this point in the orbit of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris, and is looking forward to spending time in a rural landscape.
In between teaching and her residency, Branca will spend the winter in Los Angeles while she works on a variety of multimedia projects.
In Chicago, she is a founding member of First Floor Theater, and while she is not directly involved in the upcoming productions, the company practices a collective dramaturgy, which provides ample opportunity for involvement. Branca also assisted in organizing FFT’s annual gala, which took place on October 3.
Branca is also in the process of releasing two chapbooks. The first, Night Rooms, is now available as a physical, self-published printing, or as a digital pdf here. Night Rooms focuses on interpersonal relationships, loss, time, and how these affect the human body.
The next chapbook, Scorpio / Sagittarius, is a collaboration with Dakota Loesch, with each contributing half to the hypothetical-fictional-fantastic writing, with Branca and Loesch switching,voices for the project, writing as if each author were a younger version of the other before they met. The chapbook explores “what it is to create a mythos” about another person.
For more information about Sid Branca and her upcoming plans and projects, please visit the links below:
http://sidbranca.com/
http://sidbranca.bigcartel.com
http://twitter.com/sidbranca
