The First Coast is a mobile studio / exhibition space that will travel to year-round coastal communities in Maine during the off-season. Through collaborations with local organizations and workshops with community members, the documentarians and artists traveling with The First Coast will collect sounds, stories, images, and ideas that seek to reconstruct existing narratives and mythologies of bot
h Maine and Mainers. Collaborating writers and photographers will work with local residents and communities to reconstruct and repossess a changing maritime identity. We'll be working in traditional and experimental media to create audio-visual based installations that use narratives and stories to evoke both memory and a sense of place through sound and image. TFC also provides archiving services to local institutions and families.
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In January 2017, independent audio producer Galen Koch began renovating a 1976 Airstream camper-trailer to take on the road. The trailer will be outfitted with a digital media lab and capabilities for archiving VHS, cassettes, 16mm film, and 8mm film. The First Coast Airstream will travel up the coast between Fall 2017 and Fall 2018 visiting five coastal towns: Chebeague Island, Friendship, Stonington, Beals, and Lubec. By asking residents to identify stories they want told and documented, TFC artists will collect, record, and archive community-driven stories and narratives. The First Coast artists and documentarians will create five site-specific exhibits to bring back to each coastal community. This project is intended to be shared with year-round Maine communities and to fuel conversations about how Mainers are preserving culture, adapting to change, and sustaining a year-round life in coastal towns. We want to re-think the way communities engage with documentarians and storytellers, to create stories and exhibits that invite interaction and dialogue.
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This project is created by Galen Koch an independent audio producer living in Portland, Maine. A native Mainer, Galen grew up in Stonington and graduated from Deer Isle-Stonington High School in 2007. She is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and has reported stories for NPR, BBC World Service, Radiotopia’s The Heart, and MPBN. For the past year she’s focused on stories about Portland’s working waterfront, in collaboration with Waterfront Alliance and Casco Bay Estuary Partnership, you can listen to those stories at www.wharfside.org. The First Coast is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, a non‐profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of The First Coast must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” and are tax‐deductible to the extent permitted by law. The First Coast is funded in part by the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. The First Coast has also received funding from The Kindling Fund, a grant distributed by SPACE Gallery as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts’ Regional Regranting Program. For more information about TFC visit www.thefirstcoast.org
If you'd like to make a tax-deductible donation to TFC during our 30-day fundraising campaign please visit www.thefirstcoast.org and click DONATE in the upper right hand corner.
