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SiMalaya Alcampo competes with multimedia work in RCI Roots Challenge Multimedia work by Jo SiMalaya Alcampo has been accepted into the Roots Challenge, a national competition of short films and multimedia productions launched by CBC's Radio Canada International (RCI). The competition aims to identify the best Canadian producers and to show the multicultural reality of Canada’s urban and rural regions.

Jo SiMalaya’s entry is entitled Paalaala/Remembrance.  It is competing in the “Best Multimedia Document” category and is subject to online voting from April 1 to 8. 

She describes it as “a personal narrative about collective memory, and the act of bearing witness.”  The work asks, “How does one create art about traumatic experiences you did not directly experience? What is one’s role in making meaning from these memories?”

The work, which uses original 8mm footage, archival photographs and digital video, follows similar themes she is currently exploring in her interactive thesis project at OCAD, Singing Plants and Reconstructing Memory.

Jo SiMalaya was interviewed on CBC Radio One’s Here and Now program (Toronto) about her work, and about her one-person play, The Inviable Heart, which was presented at Theatre Passe Muraille’s Backspace as part of the Flipside Festival, a showcase of Filipino-Canadian playwrights and performers, produced by Carlos Bulosan Theatre.

Singing Plants and Reconstructing Memory, Jo SiMalaya Alcampo’s thesis presentation, will be given on Thursday, April 22, 2010 in Room 340 of OCAD’s Main Building at 100 McCaul Street.  Her work will also be presented as part of OCAD’s 95th annual Graduate Exhibition Enter OCAD from May 6 to 9.