Wolf Inventory: A Film Project
As part of a research project supported by the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, Zefyr Lisowski, an Adjunct Professor in the English department at Hunter College, is developing Wolf Inventory, a film-in-progress and multimedia collaboration with filmmaker and artist Candace Thompson looking at the intersections of haunting, childhood/early adolescent sexual violence, and trans and femme coming-of-age in the rural South. Told through rituals, ghost stories, and reveries, the film creates a space to heal from child trauma while also acknowledging its constituent parts and the violence present for marginalized bodies.
Preliminary parts of this film were shot with the support of the Lacawac Center for the Arts in Summer 2018, constructing improvisational rituals and conversation looking at the (white) trans-femme body as a site of exploration into these violences. The CUNY Adjunct Incubator grant is being used to fund reshoots and to bring in more people to the project, opening the project to more queer Southern survivors of sexual violence to share their experiences onscreen in a way that is equitable, transformative, and healing. Additionally, the grant will be used to fund launch events upon the completion of the film, hosting panel discussions on how to deal with these violences systemically and individually. Ultimately, Wolf Inventory aims to be both an artwork and a document, showing queer and trans trouble and joy—something frequently left out of conversations around sexual violence and recovery—in equal, dazzling measure.
This project is part of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator and is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
