Anabel Vasquez Rodriguez and Rafael Angel introduce the exhibit.

On Fri 27, together with Jenny Larios Berlin, and Sasha Costanza-Chock, I attended the opening event at Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion (IBA) for Rafael Angel’s exhibit, “Puerto Rico en Reflejos.” IBA is the community organization of the Villa Victoria community in Boston’s South End. One program of IBA’s varied community development work is community building through arts education and events. The IBA galleries host artists from around the world, and this was the first instance of a show by a Villa Victoria resident.

I attended in part to assist Jenny with her collaborative documentary film project with Villa Victoria and IBA in the Spring Codesign Studio and has been continuing to work on a trailer for a feature this summer with funding from an MIT Public Services Center Summer (PSC) Fellowship. The PSC supports students via fellowships throughout the year — in the Summer and on a rolling basis in the Fall and Spring terms (more info about the fellowship: http://web.mit.edu/mitpsc/whatwedo/internshipsandfellowships/fellows-apply.html).

Jenny has been documenting her progress this summer on her blog: http://vvproject.blogspot.com/
During the Spring semester last year, she blogged on the class site: http://codesign.mit.edu/author/jlbseeking/

We filmed the general activity at the event which included gallery and art tours by Rafael Angel, performances by musicians and residents of Villa Victoria, and interviews with Rafael, his mother; Vanesa Calderon-Rosado, executive director of IBA; and Anabel Vasquez Rodriguez, curator of IBA.

We posted a few stories via mobile phones to the Villa Victoria Vojo group while we at the event:

http://vojo.co/en/groups/parcel19

For the trailer footage, we shot on a professional HD camera and captured audio via the on-board mic and via wireless lavaliers, all of which Jenny rented locally from Rule Camera (http://www.rule.com/). She has been using HD cameras to capture footage and has found that lavaliers have been necessary to capture audio clearly because the on-board mics capture too much ambient sound.