“Skowhegan”:
Nao Bustamante

How would you imagine an artist colony?

Artist Nao Bustamante digs deep into her archive to stitch together a feature length film that was all but lost since 1999. That year, Nao was a participant at Skowhegan. As a young filmmaker guided by faculty, including iconic filmmaker John Waters, she collaborated with her community to create a meta story of artists at an art colony called “SKOWHEGAN.” This work became the blueprint for a string of films that led Nao towards collaborative filmmaking. She went on to develop interdisciplinary film-formances, “Silver & Gold” presented at Sundance International Film Festival and her 360º mini-series, “The Wooden People”, which premiered at REDCAT. Returning to the material at Skowhegan two decades later, Nao presents a screening guided by this initial question (“how would you imagine an artist colony?”) and the ongoing process of participating in an artist community through memory. 

After the screening, Nao has organized an open gathering alongside some fellow participants from that year to mutually expand their muscular memories. Together, we will talk about the experience of being at the School (and Nao’s fictional colony) not as something that happened in the past or in a specific location in Maine, but as an ongoing exercise of imagination in the present.

As the first in a series of events centered on alternative schools, youth, and pedagogical models from the past and present, this screening situates Skowhegan into an ecology of different organizations and learning projects around the world.