Ted Efremoff, whose artwork was featured in the film we created on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Fulbright Program, has been recently working on films himself. A Refugee’s Guide to Rome juxtaposes the story of Joseph, a contemporary refugee from Sierra Leone, and the Trojan prince Aeneas who in Virgil’s Aeneid becomes the founder of Rome as a refugee from the Trojan war. This story is told by Joseph, as he guides fellow refugees through the Eternal City to support them in their new life.
An excerpt from A Refugee’s Guide to Rome, was screened at the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation’s webinar, in collaboration with Nordic Africa Institute, titled, “Centering the Voices of African Migrants in a worldwide screening from Johannesburg, South Africa.
The premiere of the film is scheduled for October of 2021 at Central Connecticut State Universities panel on migration sponsored by the Center for Africana Studies at CCSU and Gallery Central.
In 2021, Ted has received the AAUP CSU Research Grant to work on another film titled Sowing the Tempest: Seeds of Change in Fact and Myth. The film explores the relationship between climate change and food security. The film will be shot during an artist residency I received titled The Arctic Circle Summer Expedition, an arctic voyage around the Svalbard Archipelago on a vessel hosting scientists, artists, educators and architects for the purposes of research and collaboration. Svalbard Archipelago, a Norwegian land situated ten degrees latitude from the North Pole is home to the Svalbard Global seed Vault. Additional footage for the film will be shot at the 8th Kjerringøy Land Art Biennale, Kjerringøy, Norway, to which Ted has been invited as a participant.
In 2020, I-Park International Artist Residency in East Haddam, Connecticut published a catalog titled Ted Efremoff, Works at I-Park. The catalog included eight major environmental artworks produced by him between 2007 and 2020. It included the video Kuker/Muker which was shot in part at I-Park.
