For A Long Time
Emerson Goo2026 Visual Art Grant Recipient
Drawing on philosopher Sunaura Taylor’s concept of "disabled ecologies," For A Long Time is a photography/film workshop about the intersections of disability and the environment in Hawaiʻi. By framing Hawaiʻi’s lands and waters as environments which are disabled or impaired by capitalism, colonization, and militarization—and which require care and recognition of their interdependency, as disabled individuals do—workshop participants will link struggles for disability and environmental justice. Participants will produce photography and/or film-based artwork which documents their embodied and somatic relationships to the environment through the lens of crip epistemology, explore strategies for making their art more accessible, and display their work in an online exhibition. Through this project, I hope to instigate a wider consciousness of disability arts and anti-ableist practices in our arts communities. The way we relate to ʻāina is an experience of alterity and vulnerability, rather than one involving only abled bodies within “ideal” landscapes.
Emerson Goo is a Deaf writer, film curator, and planner/landscape designer from and based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. His writing on film and environmental design can be found in publications such as e-flux Criticism, Film Comment, MUBI Notebook, Screen Slate, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and the New York Review of Architecture. He has programmed films with the Honolulu Museum of Art, multi.projects, and the Cal Poly Film Production Society, and founded UNDERCURRENTS, a screening series of innovative and alternative documentary cinema in Honolulu. He has mentored the Hawaiʻi International Film Festival's Online Critics and Creators Immersive, served as a member of the Letterboxd Piazza Grande jury at the Locarno Film Festival, and was a Documentary Magazine Editorial Fellow at the International Documentary Association. He is a member of NETPAC and the Hawaiʻi Film Critics Society.