Fluid Digital Story Telling 
People live to tell stories.
  
“The only thing that I wanted to do in my life–and the only thing that I have accomplished more or less–is to tell stories. But I never  imagined that it would be so much fun to tell them collectively.” 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We all have stories to tell, and these constitute an infinite universe springing from the desire to re-tell those stories that we have been told, until we manage to tell our own personal story. 

In the beginning, humankind told oral stories to make sense of the universe, nature, and the spiritual world, and to pass on emotional wisdom to the next generation. Nowadays, thanks to the evolution of affordable and simple digital cameras, editing software, computer memory, and online portals,  a wide swath of people from across the socio-economic spectrum are able to share and experience stories, not only in written form but through a wide variety of audiovisual
media formats.
 
The Digital Story Telling Workshop creates an opening in the space of the Fluid festival, where it’s possible to engage with the emotional exchange generated by each others’ stories. As a result of the participants’ will  learn new technologies combined with their fearless exploration of their own narratives, we are able to present here 12 unique voices, 12 personal stories. The participants discovered that newly acquired as well as found images, objects,  pictures, and  video clips can become not only a rich stream of source material for their projects, but also are a profound inspiration to explore and expose the depths of their hearts, memories and life experiences. 

We’d like to thank these students who so generously offered their personal stories and honored us by their moving reminder of how memory both lives and transcends through storytelling.

Project Luz

As part of the second edition of Fluid, Aura Sosa and Gabriel Roldós invited Project Luz to teach a Digital Story Telling workshop for the Immigrant Community of Queens.  Between August and October of 2009 Sol Aramendi and Juan David Casas lead a workshop of Digital Stories for a group of Latin-American immigrants.  As a result each student shared a story of their life using images, video and their own voice.  This publication is a catalogue of the participants and their stories.

With photography as a tool to explore the city and tell its stories, Project Luz is a learning space where participants can share different points of views through images. Founded by photographer and educator Sol Aramendi in 2004, Project Luz invites its participants, immigrants from Hispanic countries, to make connections between their everyday life experiences with learning.  Project Luz is nomadic and its mother tongue is Spanish.