The Story
In the summer of 2002, eight digital artists from the UK and Holland drove into the Arizona desert with cameras, laptops, and a single belief — that the most isolated communities on earth deserve the same creative tools and the same platform as anyone else. Three weeks. Three Native American communities. Everything published live to rez02.net. This was REZ02 — the most ambitious project Cafe Society had ever attempted.
The team
The REZ02 crew was a working production unit — not a cultural exchange programme, not a tourism visit, not a charity mission. Eight artists travelling four thousand miles to do real work with real communities.
Jon Robson — photography, web, direction. Murray Clark, Annabel McCourt, Ray Ford, Gill Patchet, Felix Gonzalez, Lucy Crystal, Nirit Peled. And critically — the hosts, guides and community members who made it possible. Shonie De La Rosa, half Navajo and half German-Jewish, a long-time reservation resident and Jon’s old friend, who opened every door. Marci and Luanne Somers at the ETIP programme at Monument Valley High School. Mike at the River Children Project on the Gila River. Bob Shogren at San Manuel.
Without those relationships — built over years of visits beginning with the On The Road trip in 1998 — REZ02 would not have been possible.
Location One — Tuba City and the Moenkopi Youth Program
The first workshop base was Tuba City on the Navajo Reservation – home to the Moenkopi Youth Program and a community of young Hopi people who, in Jon’s words, were shy at first and then unstoppable.
For four days the team ran hands-on digital media workshops — cameras, editing, web publishing, storytelling. The Hopi young people learned fast. They had things to say. They had visual languages and ways of seeing that were entirely their own. The workshops gave them the technical means to share that with the world.
The Navajo Reservation covers an area larger than many European countries. It is simultaneously one of the most visually extraordinary landscapes on earth and one of the most economically marginalised communities in the United States. The REZ02 team didn’t arrive with answers. They arrived with equipment, skills, and the patience to listen.
Location Two — Gila River
The second stop was the Gila River Indian Community south of Phoenix – a very different landscape and a very different community from the high desert of the Navajo Reservation, but the same fundamental dynamic. Young people with stories, creative instincts, and very limited access to the tools needed to share them.
The River Children Project provided the community infrastructure. The REZ02 team provided the technical skills. What emerged in the workshop sessions was the community’s own — their images, their words, their perspective on their world.
Location Three — San Manuel
The third and final community was San Manuel in the San Pedro Valley – a mining town with a complex history and a community navigating the aftermath of industrial decline. Bob Shogren facilitated the workshop sessions and provided the local knowledge that made the work possible.
Three communities. Three weeks. Three entirely different contexts – but the same methodology throughout. Arrive with equipment and skills. Create space. Listen. Step back. Let the community make the work.
rez02.net — live from the road
Throughout the three weeks, everything was documented and published live to rez02.net – a website built and updated from the road as the project unfolded. Images, text, workshop documentation, community voices – all going live in real time to audiences back in the UK and beyond.
In 2002 this was technically demanding. Connectivity on the Navajo Reservation was limited and unreliable. Uploading large image files from a laptop in a desert community required patience and ingenuity. But the principle – that this work should be visible as it happened, not just documented after the fact — was non-negotiable.
The same principle that had driven On The Road in 1998 was alive and well in Arizona in 2002.
The Way of the Navajo
The REZ02 project didn’t end when the team flew home. The imagery, relationships and sustained engagement with Navajo culture that Cafe Society had developed over four years of visits — beginning with the On The Road road trip in 1998 and continuing through REZ02 — became the foundation for a major video installation.
Way of the Navajo was a twenty-minute looped video installation — a politically charged, poetic meditation on Navajo history, culture, spirituality, land rights, and resistance. Photography and direction by Jon Robson. Audio by Murray Clark. Animations by Graeme Crowley. It premiered at The Big Chill Festival in the UK — a three-screen triptych video installation with immersive soundscape, situated in the forest.
The community had given Cafe Society something rare – sustained trust, creative access, and the privilege of witnessing a culture from the inside. The installation was the response: a serious, sustained, publicly exhibited work of art built from that relationship.
What it means for Digital Schools
The REZ02 methodology – arrive with skills, create space, listen, step back, let the community make the work — is the direct ancestor of how Digital Schools approaches every school website project today.
We don’t arrive with templates. We don’t impose a house style. We start with a conversation about the school — its values, its community, its story, what it wants the world to know about it. Then we build something that reflects that, authentically and precisely.
The Navajo communities of Arizona and the primary schools of East Yorkshire are separated by four thousand miles and entirely different circumstances. But the instinct is identical — every community has a story worth telling, and deserves the tools to tell it well.
The Navajo workshops demonstrated how digital storytelling could bridge culture, geography and identity — ideas that would later shape projects in Seychelles, Ethiopia and eventually the foundations of Digital Schools itself.
Photography and direction: Jon Robson. REZ02 crew: Murray Clark, Annabel McCourt, Ray Ford, Gill Patchet, Felix Gonzalez, Lucy Crystal, Nirit Peled. rez02.net, 2002.
