shadow work
From the Archives
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Documentary, Educational, Short Films, 11-Oct-2023
An archival exploration of a St. Louis housing project, Pruitt–Igoe, that tends to the dark spaces concealed in a collective past. Lorenzo Bradford’s “shadow work” is an experimental archival documentary where awashed materials are recycled and used to examine Black life and dispossession. Broken into three sections indicated as his “archive notes,” Bradford contextualizes the mostly forgotten black housing project. As we learn about its initial construction being a part of an urban renewal project, we also learn of its darker history being in proximity to a testing site for radiological weapons and experiments during the Cold War. While we occasionally hear Bradford narrate, we mostly observe juxtaposed sequences between Super 8 footage, St. Louis historical insights, and various other documents of Pruitt–Igoe — including a rare look at the black teens living in the Pruitt-Igoe project from the 1969 documentary titled, “More Than One Thing.” In this experimental sequence between images, along with Bradford’s narration, the film carefully and thoughtfully documents this concealed space and time in St Louis’s, and our greater American, history. -JM. Director: Lorenzo Bradford.
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