Portals

Portals is a collaborative media arts anthology that imagines and gathers the bio-mythographies of new mothers and caregivers in a multiversal, fragmented storyworld. Through collective storytelling and participatory world-creation, the project manifests as a short film anthology combined into a single speculative non-fiction film and a multimedia installation that will invite audiences into an experiential realization of the storyworld.

The Portals storyworld is based on a short-form memoir written by Kamee Abrahamian called “Queer Motherhood is Speculative Fiction.” It follows a first-person narrator as a multiverse portal rips through her body during labor, giving her the ability to glimpse into other versions of her life. The original narrative uses speculative fiction and multiverse travel to convey the inexpressible physical and emotional experience(s) of becoming a primary caregiver to an infant. Using this story as scaffolding, Portals will invite five other artists and filmmakers (who are mothers/primary caregivers) to create a short film from their own experiences and build into this world. Conceived independently, but workshopped and brought to life collectively, the larger filmic work transforms the personal into a collaborative endeavor, allowing for new ways to collectively express, share, remember and imagine bio-mythographies of motherhood and care.

The installation will be an experiential, three-dimensional manifestation of the storyworld, using mediums of video projection, set design, audio soundscapes, live performance, and the creation of textural and material ephemera from the world. Audiences will walk through, touch, and interact with elements of each narrative.