Mercedes Pt. 1

Mercedes, Part 1, a multidisciplinary documentary, gallery, and healing room installation by Modesto Flako Jimenez brings viewers into a poetic, visually stunning recreation of the Bushwick home where he was raised by his grandmother Mercedes after he arrived from the Dominican Republic. As an adult, Flako served as her main caregiver as she battled dementia, and uncovered years of letters, receipts, and papers that documented her impact on the Latine community. Part of a larger multidisciplinary project, Mercedes, Part 1 unlocks one woman’s home to amplify community outreach, spread the word about mental healthcare resources, and captivate audiences with an immersive story of multigenerational care.

I‘ve been incredibly fortunate to have worked with Flako Modesto Jimenez over the past decade or so on a variety of projects. As usual, his work, rigor, and ingenuity on Mercedes did not disappoint. Mercedes Pt. 1 was a strange, hybrid project. Part art installation, part documentary screening, and part community gathering, designing this work took a lot of creativity and flexibility. Fortunately, we were in great hands with the excellent staff and equipment at BAM Fisher. The primary installation took place in the main theatrical space where we built a kind of replica of Flako’s apartment that he shared with his grandmother. Unlike much of my work, the audio content for this had to be simple, refined, and mostly realistic. However, speakers had to be dropped in a variety of odd places to perfectly replicate things like, the refidgerator tone (which I recorded directly from Flako’s apartment a few months beforehand), the birds chirping outside, the occassional rumbling of the train in the distance, and the flicker of the lights. This was all driven on a complex Qlab session which ran independently and looped sounds back in specifically timed intervals to leave sonic space for the various effects.

The main event of the work in many ways was the screening of the documentary, which audiences viewed from projection surfaces and old-school TVs mounted within the apartment installation. Again, the sound here was a hybrid. We utilized small, computer and TV-style speakers within the house to play back a kind “realistic” idea of watching a movie at home with your family. However, for key sections and moments within the doc, we exploded the sound to above and around. While I did not design or edit the documentary sound itself, I programmed a variety of additional sound FX to be played alongside the documentary in time with it so that we could immerse audiences in key moments of the documentary and make them feel like they were transported into another world, even briefly, before thrusting them back into the stark realism of the apartment and home-speaker setup of the core doc audio.

Modesto Flako JimenezConception and Creation
Brisa Areli MuñozDocumentary Director
Drew Sensue-WeinsteinSound Designer
Michael Minahan and Henry PedersenScenic Designer

Megan LangLighting Designer
Juan “Wamoo” Alvarez and Victor MoralesVideo Designer
Cricket BrownHealing Room Curation

*Production photos by Angel Origgi

Press

“Evoking tears and laughter, Mercedes, Part 1 is a powerful, graceful and intimate walk through the life of a woman whose impact reverberated from Bushwick to the Dominican Republic and now to BAM.”

- Richard Burrough, Brooklyn Reader
“The designers for the BAM premiere have been committed to the Mercedes project for these past three years, and Flako praised each designer’s artistry extensively. The gallery is modeled after Mercedes’s apartment (including a bedroom, kitchen, and foyer), which the audience is meant to walk through. The healing room will provide art supplies and a space to process after experiencing the rest of the installation, and a social worker and art therapist will be there to provide support.”
- Olivia Shuman, Culturebot