Salome Chasnoff: Going Beyondmedia

Photo by Audrey Cho as it appeared in The Chicago Reporter.
Salome Chasnoff is executive director of the alternative media nonprofit, Beyondmedia. Salome is a video and installation artist, media activist and educator, whose work is dedicated to expanding media access for marginalized communities. She has been an arts educator for the past 20 years in university and community settings, and an artist-activist in the prison moratorium movement for 8 years.
Beyondmedia, for the most part, works with young women between the ages of 13 and 25. They also partner with many women’s and queer youth groups.
Here’s Salome…

According to Beyondmedia’s mission statement, if underserved communities can document and communicate their stories and serve as educators to others, they can generate social transformation. Can you talk more about this, and give some examples from Beyondmedia’s work?
I think when other people tell our stories, they are necessarily doing so through the veil of their own biases, experiences and agendas. This can’t be helped. Marginalized communities are by definition invisible to or misrepresented by the corporate media. So, taking your own representation into your own hands gives you tremendous power. Sharing your story with those who are uninformed can open their eyes to your humanity.
It’s particularly true for people who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy. For example, women who work in the sex trade industry. We did a documentary with women in the sex trade industry recently, “Turning a Corner.� We trained them to tell their stories and they lobbied legislators in Springfield [Illinois] around specific bills that were pending. Several of the legislators said that it was through hearing the women’s voices—hearing the women’s stories through their own voices—that their minds were changed, and their votes. The women ended up winning some major policy victories in Illinois because of that.
Also, people who are incarcerated are often out of sight and out of mind. We don’t know what goes on [in prison], so it’s very easy for us to carry all kinds of stereotypes about them. We have a website, Women in Prison: A Site for Resistance, and it has stories and interviews with women inside. They send us tales of their experiences which are first-person, detailed, and filled with truths that we don’t get exposed to, so they inform us differently.
We do workshops. We specialize in media production workshops which take people who have no previous experience with media making through the whole process from developing and learning basic media literacy and production skills, to learning how to focus on the issues that affect them and their communities from a politicized perspective, to developing a project and creating it as a team and taking it out to the world. The media that we produce at Beyondmedia emerges from authentic collaborations with women and girls. The stories that we represent are not a media expert’s interpretation of people’s experiences. They’re told in the voices of the people themselves. [The people] have control over how they’re being represented. The media speaks in a profound way to viewers. It can also be a life changing experience for the makers themselves because many have not had their stories heard, their realities recognized and valued. In this way, the making of media becomes the medium for community building, for healing, for social transformation.

From your work with young women, what issues do they often choose to work on or explore?
Sometimes they’re already exploring them. Sometimes they haven’t given it a thought. We have all kinds of collaborations and everyone is different. But pretty consistently, the issue of violence is often an issue; sexuality permeates all of the issues; and media representation, and how these are all connected and feed on each other. We become so used to living in a misogynistic society that the violence against women has become normalized. So, when the young women have the experience of taking the media into their own hands, it’s a way of talking back.
What are some projects Beyondmedia is working on now?
We’ve been working for the past four years with a group called The Empowered Fe Fes. It is a group of young women, primarily young women of color, who are disabled in a variety of ways. We’re showing one of the pieces that we made in a double feature. The main feature is called “Doin’ It: Sex, Disability, and Videotape.� It’s about letting the world know that young women with disabilities are sexual beings with sexual needs and sexual desires, and have a need for sex ed. They have the same dreams and hopes and ambitions that everybody does, and the same medical and educational needs.
The short tape is by young girls. It’s on bullying and how it has become a new topic, but somehow young people with disabilities, how they’re treated, is not seen as bullying. It’s a pretty virulent form of discrimination and has a big impact on their educational experience with long-range implications.
We have a women in prison program and two really powerful projects happening. One is Women and Prison: A Site for Resistance—it’s a website—which I mentioned earlier. It’s a collection of first-person oral histories of women in prison and formerly incarcerated women—articles, reports, journals, poetry, art, scholars and activists’ contributions, video, and audio. It’s a really unique place to hear the voices of women and girls affected by the prison system. We also recently got a grant to hire formerly incarcerated women to manage the site. We’re doing outreach to people in prison, and formerly incarcerated, to submit their stories. We’re providing workshops to show them how to use the site and how to contribute their stories. It’s a really powerful project. I’m really excited about it.
And then “Turning a Corner,� which I also mentioned earlier, which was made by women who were in street-level prostitution, that is in distribution in a lot of festivals. We’re doing screenings all over the country. Actually distribution of all our works is a major project that we’re strategically and intentionally expanding because it’s a great opportunity for universities to bring the voices of people [many students] are not ordinarily exposed to, into the classroom. Film festivals, cable, public television, we’re really trying to get the work out there.
One project that we’ve been working on for the past couple of years with LGBTQ youth is called “Can LGBTQ + School=Safe?� It’s a set of media organizing tools for queer youth in school settings. We’ve got the video and we’re working on the website. We are creating one guide for the students and another guide for teachers and adult facilitators. A lot of our projects have different components to make them complex tools.
For another project, we’re collaborating with two local organizations. One is Broadway Youth Center, which serves queer, transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and questioning youth, many of whom are homeless; and About Face Youth Theater. We’re doing a project, HIV: History in Voices, which is a cultural history of HIV. It’s a long project; a documentary and a theater piece are going to come out of it.

What are your views on mainstream television? Do you recommend any shows to watch?
For me, mainstream TV, I use it for entertainment only. I think it’s really dumbed down, and interviewers don’t challenge their interviewees, even when they know they’re lying. For me, it’s a place to—when I’m tired—to crash, and do what everybody else does. I watch “The Daily Show,� “The Colbert Report,� “Grey’s Anatomy.� I love “Roseanne� reruns. Sometimes, when I’ve been working really hard, I’ll stay up late and watch garbage. I watch “The L word� when I can get it in.

Do you have any Oscar picks?
I haven’t seen them all. One film that I saw that I loved is “Volver.� I love Pedro Almodovar’s work, especially the later stuff. Penelope Cruz is up for an award. “Volver� is up for best foreign. I’m not really sure why they’re separated; why it has its own category. I think maybe that needs to be looked at a little more. I would vote for that.
I loved Eddie Murphy’s performance in “Dream Girls.� I just thought it was a stand-out performance.

What is the first step to becoming a media activist?
Learn to see and read mass media against the grain, critique it. Even if you enjoy it, be aware of how it might degrade or misrepresent people. Don’t take the news on TV or in the newspapers at face value. Be suspicious. Educate yourself. Read widely and track down other sides of the story so your opinion can be better informed.
Then, find a way to take media into your own hands. Media literacy, which is about learning the concepts that allow you to critique media, also needs to involve learning the tools that will allow you to make your own.
Also, look at alternative media. Even stuff, by so-called professional standards, that is considered good. Professional says who?
I used to be on the board of the women’s film festival here in Chicago that is now defunct. I learned more from films by emerging artists—films that defy mass media standards. They were so wonderful, so memorable. Little pieces that I saw 10 years ago, I still remember. They were so moving. There was something so true to them. Just having something polished and slick that’s not—just look at the Oscars, actually—they fulfill all the standards of excellence and yet you walk away and say, “So what?� You don’t feel changed by it. And then next week you’ve forgotten it. To me that’s not great work.
Some people think alternative media is too biased to the left, and for some reason mainstream media is objective. What do you say to people who hold these beliefs?
[Laughs] First of all, alternative media is made by the right also. It’s just not generated by the corporate media machine, which is what makes it alternative. Media isn’t just movies, it’s also magazines, internet, music videos—there’s such a broad range of information. There are many forms to media.
I think a lot of alternative media is progressive because we’re smart and creative. [Laughs] Does anybody still believe mainstream is objective? Does anybody still believe that objectivity is possible? Everything that’s been going on in the media and around the Iraq war, you’d have to be living in a cave to believe that mainstream media is objective. The purpose of mainstream media is to earn money for its stockholders. Not to inform us. So, whatever serves that end is what is going to be published. For example, in order for Exxon Mobil to make record profits every year, they have to suppress the truth about global warming. Exxon Mobil funds a lot of media. Now it’s just been reported that they’re paying scientists to debunk global warming.
Another movie I would like to win [an Oscar] is the Al Gore movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.� That’s up for best documentary. It’s not just about its value as a viewing experience, but the impact it’s had, it’s awesome in terms of widespread education. I think taking that lecture he’s been doing for years—and we’re not talking about just some insignificant guy, this is Al Gore, he has a lot of power in the world—he has been doing this lecture all over the world. But once it became a film, it just escalated its effect, its impact, its reach, and the power surrounding it. The power of the message became amplified. It’s a wonderful example of the power of media—its ability to focus our attention and reframe it. I see it all the time in the work that we do. Bringing that power to the experience, to the realities of marginalized people—it has the same effect on a smaller scale at Beyondmedia.