See our latest work. After several weeks of developing skills and building relationships of trust, the MTE team produced work worth pausing over — photographs, video clips, written passages, and photo collages that are already much more than simple exercises. These are the beginnings of something real.
Learning by Doing
The media arts component of the MTE project was never aimed at training professional broadcasters. The goal was simpler and, at the same time, more radical: to place the tools of documentation directly in the hands of participants — people who had spent decades being documented by others, by institutions, by support workers, by researchers, and almost never by themselves.
From the project's early sessions, tablets and cameras were made available to the group. They were picked up, passed from hand to hand, pointed at walls, at faces, at windows. There was laughter. There was also something more considered — the way someone lifts a camera when they understand that it is not just a toy, but an instrument for saying: I was here, I saw this, here is what I chose to show you.
Learning to frame an image is learning to decide what belongs inside the frame and what is left out. For MTE project participants, this skill carries a particular resonance. The institutional system rested on the idea that others knew better what should be part of your life. Choosing what enters a frame reverses that logic, modestly but genuinely.
What the Work Represents
By November, the group had accumulated a body of work across several forms. Photographs taken during sessions captured spontaneous moments — people mid-conversation, hands gesturing, faces concentrating. Some participants had taken tablets home or into the community and came back with images from their daily lives: a street corner they pass every morning, a garden, a kitchen table.
The video clips ranged from accidental to intentional. Some were brief attempts, the camera swinging as someone learned to use it. Others were more deliberate — a participant speaking directly to the lens, practising being in front of the camera without an interviewer managing the exchange. There is something significant about speaking to a camera you are holding yourself, or one operated by someone you trust. The act of looking into the lens becomes a choice: who you are addressing, and why.
Written work was also developing in parallel with the visual work. Participants contributed reflections, short narratives, fragments of memory. These elements would eventually feed into the illustrated story that Robert Concordia was developing about his years at the Rideau Regional Centre. But they also had their own value as testimony of lived thoughts and experiences.
What Comes Next
November was a moment to take stock of what had been created and begin thinking about how these elements fit together. The work would continue to evolve through early 2020. What the group had in November was not finished — but it was proof that something sincere was taking shape, made by people working on their own terms, in their own voices, towards a story that had never been told in quite this way before.