Watch Thollem’s “Freedom Hoarders” Video:
Today we watch Thollem McDonas and ACVilla‘s latest installment, “Freedom Hoarders“, from their Who Are U.S. audio/visual project. The duo has been traveling the lower 48 states since March, documenting this nation’s divided election cycle thru a series of video’s that are paired with tracks off Thollem’s 2016 release Machine In The Ghost, out now on Personal Archives.
“Freedom Hoarders” is filled with haunting imagery from their travels and we see things like desolate oil fields, blaring police sirens, and decomposing bird wings flapping in the dry wind. Like the pair’s first episode, “Where Belongs Who”, shot along a stretch of border between Arizona and Mexico, this new offering also employs “the fence” as a powerful visual metaphor.
A long-standing rhetorical centerpiece for our presumptive president-elect, Trump’s threat to wall the border between the U.S. and Mexico has been a mainstay of his divisive politics. A potent symbol of this closes the video when we see a bald eagle peering out from behind a small, fenced enclosure, and while the implications of that are pretty clear, earlier images of caged ostriches might invite more speculation.
Mythologized for burying their heads in the sand when frightened, the ostrich as visual metaphor seems to radiate meaning in several directions at the same time. Whether it was out of fear, ignorance, or distraction, how many of us had our heads in the sand during this election, and with the results now in, who’s once again ready to engage our democracy with clear, enlightened vision?
