MFA Alum Clement Hil Goldberg awarded 2022 Creative Capital grant

Stills from Our Future Ends performance, 2018. Image credit:  Clement Hill Goldberg

Clement Hil Goldberg is an award-winning Multidisciplinary Artist, Writer, Director and Animator who is non-binary trans and queer. They work across disciplines to create satirical yet hopeful projects that center collective grief rooted in climate crisis, cultural erasure and collapse. 

Their narrative film-in-progress Let Me Let You Go received the coveted and prestigious 2022 Creative Capital Award. Inspired by creative and healing powers of mushrooms and hallucinogens, Goldberg uses near future sci-fi to bring our focus back to Earth. Let Me Let You Go is a comedic science fiction feature about hope, grief and humor as everything falls apart. The story opens in present day San Francisco. Miguel, sick of his gig as a psychedelic trip sitter, steals mushrooms from his Silicon Valley client and Cary is abducted from a sidewalk by an unmarked security force. The pair meet in detention where MF, an investor interested in life-extension research and cultural preservation, offers the artists an immortality serum to survive imminent societal and ecological collapse. The narrative film combines live action and stop motion animation. 

Let Me Let You Go develops many of the themes that Goldberg explored in their previous interdisciplinary projects, most often using allegories of animal and plant life to speak about the precious and imperiled ‘wild life’ of queer, artistic and cultural communities. Our Future Ends, (2018) a multidisciplinary satire about near-extinct lemurs and the long-lost continent of Lemuria, began as a stop motion-animation short film (shown at their MFA thesis exhibition in 2016 at BAMPFA), and later developed into a 50 minute live musical performance. Our Future Ends was described by LA Weekly writer  Shana Nys Dambrot as a “A fantasy confection of glitter, style, kitsch and karma….offer[ing] a neat, binary analogy between an anthropomorphized population of endangered lemurs and a postmodern cult of queer spirituality. The idea is that parallel stories of extinction face the animal population and authentically indie queer spaces, as each is threatened by forces of commerce, industrialism, opioids and cultural appropriation.”