Award-winning documentarians and academics Jon Cox, Katrin Redfern, and Andrew Stern have produced a multimedia exhibition documenting the Hadza tribe of Tanzania. The exhibit will present Hadza daily life, culture, and knowledge through photography, an immersive soundscape, text and artifacts – including a traditional Hadza grass hut. The exhibit will run through January 12, 2019.
The evening will begin with short presentation to be followed by a screening of Hadza: Last of the First. A Q& A and refreshments will follow.
Long before the social justice movements of today, humans were engaged in a living experiment in equality. Our common origins as egalitarian hunter-gatherers challenge the idea of human society as inherently selfish and competitive. The Hadza, some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers on the planet, provide insight into our past, and into how we might imagine our future at a time when a reimagining is desperately needed. The Hadza are living as they have for tens of thousands of years in one of the most iconic landscapes in the world, the savannahs and grasslands of Northern Tanzania. With a unique language, an egalitarian culture, and expert knowledge about their environment, the Hadza continue today in the region where modern humans evolved over 100,000 years ago. Although they have lost 90% of their land in the last 50 years, they are one of the few remaining sources of valuable direct knowledge of how humans lived for most of our time on earth – sustainably, and with equality for all regardless of gender, age, or ability. The Hadza are an important example for our present, and a people who are also our best hope for a continuing tie to our past. What can this joyful, just and sustainable society teach us about how to live now? Learn more at Hazda: The Roots of Equality.
Produced by:
- Jon Cox is a National Geographic Explorer, an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Delaware, Board Member of the Dorobo Fund for Tanzania and Board member of the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research. Cox worked on a six-year collaborative documentary book project with the Hadza in Tanzania titled Hadzabe, By the Light of a Million Fires. Cox is a co-recipient of a National Geographic - Genographic Legacy Fund Grant to support a collaborative cultural mapping initiative with the Ese’Eja foraging people living in the Amazonia basin of Peru. A traveling exhibition to accompany this project titled The Ese’Eja People of the Amazon: Connected by a Thread is currently on tour across the United States.
- Katrin Redfern is a multimedia journalist, writer and producer who reports on human rights and conservation. She has written for the BBC, The Daily Beast, The Indypendent, and Huffington Post, among others. She produces film (two Sundance Festival Official Selections), theater (five Tony Award nominations), radio, and podcasts, from science news to audio drama. Katrin is also an award-winning fiction writer and playwright and a longtime activist focusing on labor issues. She holds a BA from the Institute for Social Ecology, an MA from the University of Sussex, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.
- Andrew Stern is a photographer and journalist whose work has taken him to the planet's farthest reaches on many projects. His primary areas of concentration are social and political issues, but he has also photographed campaigns for many leaders of industry and technology. His work has won numerous awards and has appeared in Harpers, The New York Times, Readers Digest, The Guardian and many other publications both domestically and internationally. He was a 2014 co-recipient of an Open Society Foundation grant for Water Warriors, a traveling exhibition and film on indigenous resistance to fracking (Tribeca Film Festival Official Selection). He is also a founder of the photography and film stages Starr Street Studios, Be Electric Studios and Brooklyn Soundstage.