REPARATIVE MEDIA
Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture
We are more connected than ever before.
So why has it felt like our cultural divisions, our deepest collective wounds, are intensifying?
If culture is an ecosystem, corporations control too much land for harvesting our attention, connections, knowledge, and data. They serve us culture and information as fast food: monoculturally farmed then quickly packaged, produced, and distributed for us to binge for entertainment.
Can we cultivate a better system? When we view culture as an ecosystem, we see that diversity, interdependence, and sustainability are key to our collective thriving. Healing our collective wounds—racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, and other forms of hate—requires a specific method of repair: re-distributing power more equitably to the historically disempowered.
Reparative Media imagines this community-driven process as a cookout: spaces where we all own and share organically crafted and ancestry-informed nourishment. This book offers a story and framework for storytellers, scholars, organizers, and funders trying to start or sustain such projects.
This book explores reparative media through the story of researching and developing OTV | Open Television. You can think of OTV like Netflix but independent, locally rooted, and powered by intersectionality. OTV’s app hosts films and series by Chicago-based artists who identify with multiple communities historically marginalized by systems, or intersectionality.
You can read the full Reparative Media book here. You can read the Offerings for Consent presented to artists in advance of publication here.
On this page, you’ll learn more about the individual films and series discussed in the book.
For a preview of these series, check out this super trailer:
Lipstick City
Lipstick City (2016)
Created, starring, and written by: Shea Couleé
In Lipstick City, drag artist, singer-songwriter, fashion icon and consummate performer Shea Couleé takes us to another world.
In this world, Black femmes have wealth and sophistication but also access to a glamorous, banjee underground network of queens who will enact vengeance on any man who betrays.
Lipstick City is a revenge film a la Hustlers, where Shea showcases her bougie and banjee fashion while also celebrating the Chicago drag community, set to an original score of fierce house beats.
When Shea Coulée approached me about wanting to make a film, I pledged to do everything I could, which ended up not being much. Her initial idea was far more ambitious than I had the capacity to support at the time. She needed a real budget, far larger than anything I or the OTV team had fundraised for.
So Shea called on her loved ones and community for support. Kelly Schmader came on the produce, a challenging task to schedule and keep notoriously independent drag artists on a collective path. Dan Polyak, Shea’s partner, designed graphics and edited the project once it was shot. Costume designer Tiger Lily also baked sweets for the fundraiser the team hosted at Berlin. To show the art of drag by putting on her makeup before their fundraiser, Shea and Kelly even did a livestream for the OTV Marathon on ACRE TV, a local livestream channel for artists, years before livestreaming went mainstream.
They raised nearly $10,000 and filmed the piece in locations in Chicago’s gayborhood, with support of local businesses who donated spaces and other essentials.
To get a polished look, the creative team spent a lot of time making sure all performers brought their A-game and took it seriously. “We really sold them on the fact that it wasn’t just going to be a film on our iPhones so they had to look their best,” Dan said.
The result is one of the most ambitious short films released by a drag artist at the time, distinguishing Shea as a unique talent in an increasingly crowded field. The next year, Shea was cast on RuPaul’s Drage Race in its first season on VH1, in what many fans believe is the season with the most talent.
“I think the quality of it and the celebration of the community is very unique and that it will stand the test of time, become like a historical, cultural artifact,” Kelly said.
In all, Lipstick City, while clearly a celebration of Shea’s talent, is also a celebration of a community, a collective effort, from production through its release.
“We had a pretty good reception from the community: people who contributed to the film and core individuals who were there throughout the entire process, supporting the overall vision and direction for the film. And they were very apparent in supporting it within its release!”
Bronx Cunt Tour
Created, directed, produced, and starring: NIC Kay
Bronx Cunt Tour gives one of the few, if not the only, documentary series about a Black gender nonconforming artist traveling the world.
NIC Kay filmed themselves for months as they toured their show lil BLK, an hourlong performance piece combining movement with a mix of Black music as an ode to their childhood self.
“I made lil BLK to talk to my younger self aka NICKY. I wanted her (she likes feminine pronouns) to know that I loved her and that she was finally gonna get the audience and applause she worked so hard for. The little black girl who felt too small to be as great as her wildest dreams,” NIC said.
This explains the “cunt” in the title, which refers to the style of hyperfeminine performance as developed by the ballroom scene. Through cunt performance cunt, NIC destabilizes gendered expectations and establishes their uniqueness as an artist and person: “Cunt is my black queer gender non-conforming femininity oozing from my pores. It is me staking claim to my independence. I also practice a type of vogue femme which is called soft + cunt. A slower sensual style that is powerfully seductive + playful.”
In the five-episode series, NIC shifts between performer and spectator. After explaining their practice, which they cultivated watching YouTube and making short videos of their movement, they travel to New York to start the tour. In the third episode, NIC Kay goes to Atlanta for AfroPunk, which was canceled, but they instead organize an impromptu shared bill with Rashayla Marie Brown (of Reality Is Not Good Enough on OTV). NIC then goes global and gets experimental in Berlin at the Queer Institute, before ending the Bronx Cunt Tour on a reflective note in Toronto. Sharing a collage of performance documentation and a unique archive of movement research, personal narrative, and space to contemplate what this artistic journey has been about. Concluding with a dark, beautiful recitation of Audre Lorde’s “Litany for Survival” with NIC ascending into blackness, the series also culminates in footage of their show in Chicago at Links Hall.
“I wanted to bring the audience into my journey. Embracing my femininity, exploring my femininity. And also being told by society and people around me to perform specific types of femininity, and my rejection of those things. So that’s really what the show is about.”
Traveling allowed NIC to meditate on how Black shifts across borders. “Coming to the US it’s like you kind of are forced in many ways to just adopt this sort of like, homogenous black culture, or presentation.” Growing up in the Bronx, NIC’s family are Jamaican food and listened to reggae music. “There are some like, cultural references that I don’t know from childhood because I was like, in a different world with my family then maybe some of my friends who are like, families are Black American.”
Whether in the ballroom community or mostly white Berlin, this shifting between borders reflects NIC processing feelings of (not) belonging: “I’ve never really felt welcomed in most spaces. I often say I feel like I snuck in through the backdoor in most spaces that I’m in.”
Though the series may not have the high production value of corporate reality TV, it is a true labor of love that was a lot of work for NIC to take on. The $2,000 OTV paid to license the series was not enough to cover all NIC’s costs or hire crew (their partner helped film and they edited it in iMovie), pay for adequate storage of the files or high quality cameras (they shot it on their phone). “It was absolutely horrific and I would never do it again. But I would never have to do it again because I know what I need to do. I think for me the type of learner that I am, I’m not able to tell someone to do something if I don’t understand the job.” In this way, NIC shows how the microbudget contexts in which OTV artists worked are sometimes necessary for emerging artists to gain experience so they can charge more in the future.
The Chicago premiere of NIC’s series at Woman Made Gallery, which we titled “One in Theirself” as a foil to the gallery’s “One in Herself” exhibition at the same time, was one of the most special of OTV’s early years. Featuring a maker lab hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Kamilah Rashied, guests arrived and were prompted to make collages inspired by queer artists in the museum’s collection (Robert Raushcenberg’s Combines).
Before screening Bronx Cunt Tour we hosted a panel with “One in Herself” curator Audra Jacot and OTV artist Marshall Green (of Triggers), about gender and representation in art. NIC skyped in from abroad to discuss the piece after its screening, and the audience asked questions.
NIC ultimately views their art as a practice to liberate themselves and others: “I believe that there is no liberation without art.”