Curatorial Statement

CAAMFest 2024: LIFTING THE TRUTHS OF OUR STORIES

These are stories that are brave, bizarre, beautiful, and are all true of something – they are ours. Generous expressions of what impacts us, what matters, what we long for and imagine. It is of US. It is anthropic. We are faceted in our existence.

In a year like this one, we need stories to do more than ever. Here, in the ritual of CAAMFest, we are privileged to tell our truths. In these stories we are emboldened to record how we see the world and ourselves in it. By giving ourselves permission to do so, we are responding to being overlooked, misunderstood, unknown. We are building capacities to truly see each other and to feel deeply side by side. It is the most powerful thing in movement building, our shared humanity. Amid misinformation and deep fakes, we are craving genuine perspective, and sides of ourselves that we are not afraid to share.

CAAMFest 2024 honors these storytellers of our time. To tell what is true to you is brave. We see you in your wonder, urgency, tenderness, joy, grief, determination, anger and stand with you. This CAAMFest is a call to lifting the truths of our stories.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
CAAM recognizes that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. We pay our respects and deep gratitude to the Ramaytush Ohlone elders of past, present, and future who have stewarded this land through the generations, continuing to work everyday to preserve their customs, wisdoms, and home.