My name is Jen Hughes, I live in Pt Phillip, Victoria, Australia. I’m a documentary-maker with a cultural development background in film culture and media.
The documentation in this site began in 1999 when the leaders of my community began a 10 year friendship with Suai, East Timor. Friends of Suai Their hopes were that skills and resources could be transferred from one community to the other. From Pt Phillip to Suai to assist the recovery of Suai. History - Friends of Suai
The idea for a collaborative documentary about the concept of cross-border friendship utilising electronic technologies and the Internet came in 2000 - well before the possibility of using the Internet as a place for interaction with Suai was a reality. I found myself committing ten years to the project at the same time as a gaggle of voices were warning me not to make promises I couldn’t keep!
10 year projects are not new to me. When I began this one I had recently completed an installation with artist Margaret Dodd in Adelaide. Titled ‘Forgotten Fruit’ it was a peep hole video installation in a disused stable. The documentary pieces flickered from tv monitors installed inside a thousand colourful fruit and vegetable boxes that were stacked in the form of a maze resembling a cityscape and a website design. Visitors could wander through the maze peeping through the holes in the boxes listening to a haunting soundtrack emanating from the stacks as they harvested the pieces of a non-linear story collected over ten years. The story was about the demise of a neighbourhood, that was the home of the century-old wholesale fruit and vegetable markets and a vibrant artistic community.
Cultural development is not new either. Prior to that, and overlapping that time, I was the Director of the Media Resource Centre in Adelaide for ten years. The remit of the Media Resource Centre was to support independent filmmakers and creative development with the aim of creating a vibrant film culture in South Australia.
Nine years of the ten year commitment to this project will be up in December this year - 2008. In 2001 I gave the project the name the S_Map the Suai Media Arts Project. Others came into the picture to help and so began a consulting group of arts industry and film industry friends and family members and so I came up with the name that included everybody who were contributing: the Suai Media Arts Group. This was necessary because the project developed several directions.
Now the whole kit and kaboodle is coming together in Suai Media Space. I’m going to unpack a Pandora’s box of stories.
My stories are in the past now. I will be going back in time to keep you entertained and informed with my documentaries. At the same time Broadband is arriving in Suai and a few of us will keep working to build the skills in the youth of Suai so that their presence and yours will grow on the site over the next ten years to bring about their dream - “for the voices of the youth of Suai to be heard all over the world”.
All the above is what keeps life interesting for me. I hope you enjoy your journey on Suai Media Space and that you find a way to joining the story of friendship with East Timor Suai and bringing hope to the young people there.