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Renée Green Sparks the New Global Conversation

Comments (0) By C. Carr Tuesday, Jan 9 2001

These themes come up in a more personal way in Green's video Partially Buried. In 1970, Green's mother was a graduate student at Kent State University, present on the infamous day four student protesters were killed by National Guardsmen. Her mother remembered nothing. The video is really about all kinds of loss. Green is "going home" here. (She grew up in Cleveland.) But, of course, how can one really return? Then, at Kent State, she hunts down the site of earth artist Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed, also built in 1970, and since torn down.

The video Partially Buried Continued mixes photos her father took during the Korean War with Green's video footage of some of the same places. She also focuses on another moment of historical trauma: South Korea's Kwangju massacre and the people still trying to investigate it. For Green, the video is about "ways in which one's associations to history, location, and genealogy become caught up in a subjective web which makes it difficult to separate history from fiction."

Photograph by Robin Holland

Exchanges between cultures "are not binary," says Green. "They’re circuitous and complex."

More About

Renée Green's newest book,Shadows and Signals (published by the Fundacío Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona), should be available soon in local bookstores. Other Green books are available from Barnes & Noble online (www.bn.com). Visit her revamped Web site at http://freeagentmedia.net.