Across the Table: Breaking the Divide

For my 60-second documentary, I wanted to explore the tension between athletes and artists at Muhlenberg. This idea ultimately came from a conversation card from the Dining Hall, which is the primary focus of my documentary. I would sit at the 4 circular tables in front of the dining hall with my teammates every day, greeted with this card. Seeing this, I started my research and eventually began to feel guilty after seeing posts from the Muhlenberg Weekly stating that the tables I sit at each week are a No-Go zone.

That comment stuck with me. It showed how these small social rules or jokes can turn into bigger assumptions about who belongs where. I began thinking about how I had never perceived this tension and started looking for its source. I came to the conclusion, which turned into my main argument, that the tension between athletes and artists at Muhlenberg is fueled by stereotypes and herd mentality on social media platforms like YikYak, where anonymous posts amplify divisions that don’t truly exist in daily campus life. Through still images of familiar spaces, I wanted to show that the places themselves aren’t divided. The divide only appears when people force it to be true. I did this by going around campus and taking pictures of places the Muhlenberg Website had photographed during events that were now unpopulated. After I presented my argument and the yikyak posts, I reversed the images, showing the unpopulated places before the populated ones, to emphasize how the college is a community that cannot function without everyone together.

Working on this project was difficult. I found recording the lines hard since it was a foreign skill to me; listening back to my voice was hard as I tried to tell myself what I was saying was even true or if I was feeding into the perceived tension. During recording, I had to go to the library to record the lines and was lucky to find a teammate in one of the personal work studios. While discussing the project out loud with him, I heard others around us working on homework laugh and question each other, which almost made me scrap the entire project for a new idea out of fear of sounding stupid, but I decided it only validated what I was talking about. I believe this moment gave me confidence about what I was talking about, and instead of revising and editing further, I kept my initial emotions at the time of recording rather than letting that moment sour how I felt about what I said. I think this project really revealed the bias I have as a Muhlenberg athlete. I found it impossible to let go of that part of me, but I tried my best to remember my past in High School, when the sports I played did not define me as much as they do on this campus. Im excited to add the 2 minutes and 30 seconds of time and video to this project to fully realize this project.