Interview with Kym Ragusa: (Passing) |
Interview with Kym Ragusa: (Passing)
Reel New York: Season 2
thirteen: WNET New York
From Week Four (May 1997)
Kathy High, Series Curator
Series curator Kathy High conducted this telephone interview with Kym Ragusa in May, 1997.
Q: The first question I’d like to ask you, Kym, is what prompted you to make the piece? It’s really a beautiful and incredibly moving piece.
Kym Ragusa: Oh, thank you.
Q: I wondered if this had been a story you’d heard before, as a child, and that you asked your grandmother to tell. How did it come about?
KR: Actually, my grandmother had told me the story a bunch of times. But I noticed that every time she told me, it was a little different. It would be more or less detailed, or the year would change. There’d always be something that was different. And I thought it would be a good idea just to try to record the stories as she told me. Part of it was to see how she remembered the story because it was something really traumatic for her. And also really pivotal in her life. And I wanted to see at different times, how and why she remembered certain things and not others. And why, at certain times, she would not tell me certain things. She wouldn’t be explicit about certain things — like her relationship with the man she traveled with. Actually, I did it over a period of three years. Another reason was that she has cancer and she’s not well now, and so I felt like I wanted to do something for her, and to preserve this part of her life that’s really her own thing that she did.
Read the entire interview here.