In the summer of 2016, my partner, Aza Brungardt, and I had a miscarriage after a long period of trying for a second child. It was sudden – one day the fetus simply stopped. Too quickly afterwards to schedule a procedure, it was evacuated over the course of a long day while we were home. In an effort to take our minds off the loss and try to make something from it, we began to film the process. We made an initial short film about the experience itself, but later, in 2018, Aza decided to revisit the footage for an artist showcase. We chose to more explicitly center Aza’s experience, as a queer person, of the miscarriage. So we implemented queer filmmaking practices, restricting the footage to the embodied moment and eliminating the standard push for a narrative arc by projecting the film in a continuous loop on an installation created by Aza. Working together, we constructed this film to express the extremely tenuous, sensuous experience around childbearing for queer people, including its grief.
I chose to restrict this video to adults due to its sensitive subject matter, so you’ll need to click through to YouTube to view it. The initial stills featured in the video are of the installation as seen in the gallery.
The piece below is the initial video we made in 2016, in response to a prompt concerning religion in American life, which we folded into the very strange experience of secular fertility in a religious state. It’s a more straightforward documentary approach to this particular friction. During the making of this video, Aza was going by their birth name, Amanda, and was identified with that name by participants heard in the piece.
I chose to restrict this video to adults due to its sensitive subject matter, so you’ll need to click through to YouTube to view it.