MIX film festival is an annual Gay, Lesbian, and Queer film festival that is hosted in NYC that also serves as a pop-up art gallery. I had attended the festival for several years and donated a lot of volunteer time to previous years’ festivals prior to being offered this gig.
For MIX 30, I was invited to be the “construction coordinator,” a job with token payment where I had to work with every other team - decorating crews, logistics, entertainment hosts, artists, projectionists - and determine what their material needs would be. My responsibilites then extended from design to material acquisition to execution. Not only was the budget small and the timeline short, but the festival was in March opposed to the usual November - so volunteers were harder to wrangle. Ultimately, I had to step up and do the majority on my own, with only two assistants - each on partial, separate days. Much of the work was fairly small requests - a ceiling mounted shelf for the film projector, shelves for projectors for smaller installations, hanging curtains or putting up room dividers.
The larger portion of the work (besides the logistical side of trying to plan with many artists each on their own timelines) was the construction of a large mercandise/welcome booth (which had to be secure - it was locked at night with merch, money, etc inside) and two moveable bars on wheels. Like many of my projects, my focus was on the project itself and not the documentation of said project, and I feel lucky to have anything to show. In fact, these photos were all taken after the festival was over, during strike when the booths were already being disassembled. The four holes in the front of the large booth housed computer monitors which showed clips of films and synchronized to periodically say “M I X 30” (media created by someone else). The angle at the corner was hinged with a hasp to access the electronics which controlled the screens and to allow changes to be made during the festival if necessary. MIX is a mythical beast, if you happen to have better photos from this year I would greatly appreciate getting ahold of them!
