Villa Villa Cola
Villa Villa Cola is a female skateboarding collective founded in 1996 by twins Tiffany & Nicole Morgan. They wanted to create media to represent and support girls & women who skated because the mainstream skate media was not very inclusive. I met Tiffany & Nicole in 1996 and they introduced me to a whole community of female skateboarders. We didn’t see ourselves reflected in the media of our skateboarding community so together we made zines and skate videos featuring the girls and women we knew that skated. Other frequent collaborators in the early days were Van Nguyen, Faye Jaime, Lisa Whitaker, Michelle Pezel, Jaime Sinift, Andria Lessler, and Rebecca Burnquist. I will continue to try to build this little page into an archive, but for now, here are two projects we made together.
‘Defeating Projections’ is a 16mm documentary film I made about them/us and what we were trying to do with VVC. I made it in 1999 for a class at UCSD where I was studying film/video. Getting Nowhere Faster is a skateboard video we all made together in 2004 along with Element Skateboards and 411 Video Magazine. The skateboard footage in GNF is shot almost exclusively by one of the giants of women’s skateboarding, Lisa Whitaker, owner & operator of Meow Skateboards. Lisa has probably filmed more female and non-binary skateboarders than anyone else on earth. She deserves some serious recognition and celebration for the role she has played and continues to push for in documenting, elevating, and achieving equity for women, girls, and non-binary skaters in skateboarding history.
At the beginning of the 21st century, we had a short lived 2 page spread in Transworld Skateboarding thanks to our friend Scott Pommier who advocated for us. After a handful of months it got cancelled because the magazine said it needed to sell the 2 pages for ads. So many of us, in VVC and elsewhere, tried so hard to get female and non-binary skateboarders represented in mainstream skate magazines. This was the closest we ever came to carving out a regular spot for reliable coverage. Below are some of the spreads that were published. I’m looking for the original scans and will replace these low res images if I find them.
Photo by Alex White
