Anula Shetty

ANULA SHETTY
Anula Shetty will work in collaboration with Norris Square Neighborhood Project to connect Norris Square residents through storytelling and mediamaking workshops that assert the neighborhood's beauty and power as forces of gentrification come into the community. The residency will culminate in a a video installation and festival featuring community-created Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality projects that celebrate the history and memories of the Latinx community that lives in Norris Square. By sharing these stories, the residency seeks to build bridges across generations and cultures, amplify stories of migration, and celebrate the accomplishments of change agents in the community.

NORRIS SQUARE NEIGHBORHOOD PROJECT
Throughout our history and into the present day, Norris Square Neighborhood Project has created and fostered places of gathering, cultural vision, and resiliency for the Puerto Rican and Latinx communities of Kensington. As a network of gardens dedicated to Puerto Rican cultural heritage—complete with a living museum of rural life on the island (La Casita)—and featuring art and environmentally-focused youth programming, NSNP continues to embody and reflect the cultural wisdom that is deeply rooted in our community, our gardens, and the intergenerational relationships therein.

NSNP’s success involves the expansion of learning opportunities and increasing neighbors’ access to culturally important art, culture, and agriculture. Fulfillment of our mission also involves the reclaiming of environmental knowledge, exposure to cultural education, and the proliferation of activities that support intergenerational relationship-building, skill mastery, and cultural pride. Most importantly, NSNP values the cultivation of young leaders in and around Norris Square, and endeavors to prepare these youth for a future in which art, agriculture, technology, and cultural awareness can be leveraged for individual agency and community prosperity.

Anula Shetty's project, Places of Power - Norris Square, will be an Immersive VR documentary and community media project. The project will consist of web-based virtual tours, where viewers can explore the six urban gardens in the Norris Square neighborhood and the oral histories of the Latinx community that lives here. Anula's process will include intergenerational community media workshops with long term residents in the Norris Square neighborhood.

Anula’s film, Cosmic Egg, is a documentary set against the landscape of transnational surrogacy and the outsourcing of the eggs and wombs of women in India. The film explores the long-term physical and emotional impact of reproductive technologies in a global marketplace through the personal stories and struggles of three Indian women: a health worker, a doctor, and a surrogate mother. Anula aims to investigate the impact of globalization on women's bodies, as well as provide a provocative and poignant reflection on the interplay of humanity, society, capitalism and technology.

Anula is a filmmaker who finds herself constantly drawn to stories of migration, ethnic heritage, and what it means to be 'native' and 'alien' in a foreign land. She is committed to documenting the immigrant experience on film and issues related to fear and race. Her most recent project, Not Fair, interweaves personal stories of immigrants with reports on racial profiling, the war on terror and the effects of the USA PATRIOT Act on South Asian immigrant communities. Her video work combines writing and performance ,and she explores innovative visual ways of presenting themes and images that hold personal significance. Anula has been a producer and member of the Termite TV Collective for over thirteen years. She has co-created videos with community groups as a teaching artist including the Asian Arts Initiative, the Community Leadership Institute, Grupo Motivos, and Scribe Video Center.

Screening of experimental video, "Not Fair" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and on DUTV, the 10-minute video interweaves personal stories with reports on racial profiling and other effects of the U.S. Patriot Act on South Asian immigrant communities. Support for materials, editing, and distribution.

Screening on Philadelphia's DUTV of a video that interweaves interviews, experimental visuals, personal narratives and poetry to put forward the post-9/11 experiences of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arab immigrants.