I left. And since then, I’ve been exploring people all around the world. Using video to tell their stories. Untold stories. Ignored stories. Important stories. I don’t work for money. Everything I create is a gift. All the videos, pictures, audio are given freely away on the internet with a Creative Commons license. But so many people help along the way. People give me places to stay. Food. Hot tea. Some people donate money. Others gear. I call it the OXLAEY project, instead of ME. Because I don’t – I can’t – do it alone. I’m dependent upon others. Other givers. People who translate, make music, write poetry, tell stories. WE. This is an experiment in community art.
LOST IN HOMELAND is a video poem read by the author Ms. Rossanee Nurfarida while stranded on a boat perched at the top of a four-story, urban house. Ms. Nurfarida’s current collection of poetry, Far Away From Our Own Homes, is a Finalist for the 2016 South East Asian Writers Award. Lost in Homeland was written in 2015 during the Rohingya refugee crisis when thousands of stateless Rohingya from Myanmar set out on old fishing boats seeking a better future. The video’s visual references to Islam extend the poem’s metaphor, commenting on southern Thailand’s Muslim minority as a people stranded in the country of their birth.
Ryan Anderson is a German-American filmmaker creating professional multimedia for brands such as Elite Daily, Vanity Fair (Germany), spiegel.de, and others. He leads OXLAEY – a not-for-profit project supporting towns to create short video stories about the unique people in their community. In 2015, Ryan was Artist-in-Residence in the UNESCO city of George Town, Malaysia, sponsored by a grant from Think City. Currently he is Artist-in-Residence with the Songkhla Heritage Trust in Thailand. In an earlier life, he was a government lobbyist in Berlin, Germany and staff with parliamentarian Dr. Christian Schwarz-Schilling in the German Bundestag. You can find him at @oxlaey.
Rossanee Nurfarida was born in 1987 in Hat Yai, Thailand. She graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts in New Media from Chiang Mai University, in the north of Thailand. She returned south, to her home city, and now works as a journalist at the Prince of Songkhla University radio station. “Far Away From Our Own Homes”, is her first collection of poetry and a finalist for the 2016 S.E.A. Write Award (otherwise known as the Southeast Asian Writers Award). “Far Away From Our Own Homes” is published by PAJONPHAI PUBLISHING in Bangkok. You can find her on Facebook at @rossanee22march.
