Laura Kissel first saw the field that would capture her creative imagination on a satellite map. Her curiosity piqued by the aerial perspective, the USC media arts faculty member drove to the field, located near Cordele, Ga., on the shore of Lake Blackshear in Crisp County.

“I’ve always been interested in the intersection of landscape and human activity, and I started asking a lot of questions when I saw this field. Who farms this land? Who was the first owner? Who used to live in these shacks?” she said.

It wasn’t an exercise in idle curiosity: Kissel applied for an received a grant from the S.C. Humanities Council to produce a documentary tracing the history of the mile-long field. Though far from complete, Kissel’s project demonstrates that almost any piece of land has a story waiting to be uncovered, perhaps even a compelling one.

Kissel plans to show the 30-minute documentary, “Cabin Field,” at McKissick Museum, in schools and libraries, and possibly at the Center for Land Use and Interpretation in Culver City, Calif. She also plans to pitch the show to S.C. ETV.

It turns out that the focus of Kissel’s documentary has a long and rich history. Using archival research and interviews with the field’s owner and other nearby farmers, Kissel traced the field’s origins back to the Creek Indian war fought in Georgia during the 19th century. A local farmer has shown Kissel his collection of stone arrow points gathered from the field; another farmer has a promotional filmstrip demonstrating early Ford tractors that helped to mechanize farming and transform Southern agriculture.

She’s hoping to locate children of the tenant and sharecropping farmers who once lived in the shacks on the fringe of the field.

“This documentary is a story of the increasing change in the past 60 years in farming and in the South,” Kissel said. “What I’m trying to do in this documentary is to connect the dots, to take the ephemeral artifacts and interviews and show how the present collides with the past.

“I am interpreting this place using archaeology and social geography and an artist’s eye to tell the story of what this land once was and how it became what it is today.”

Along the way, Kissel has consulted with remote sensing experts in USC’s geography department to develop more imagery for the documentary. If all goes as planned, she’ll be able to capture a sequence of images that begin with a satellite view of Earth that quickly zooms in on the Southeastern United States, ending up in the farm field in south Georgia.

Eventually, Kissel plans to share her documentary-making methodology with communities that are interested in exploring their own pasts. “I’d like to develop a model for how to do this,” she said.

09/03