[[image]] Climate Change

Question

How do racialized histories and environmental harm shape experiences of safety, belonging, and the body?

Participatory Structure

Participants use autoethnographic writing, movement, and vocal practice to examine how dominant ideas about bodies and environments are carried through language and everyday gesture.

Encounters create space for individual reflection. During group sessions, participants translate recurring words, images, and movements into a shared vocal or movement score.

Possible Public Format

Depending on the site and participating communities, the material may develop into a durational performance, procession, installation, or facilitated public encounter.

Trace of the Process

With participants’ consent, writing, images, recordings, and movement scores form a participant-authored record of the inquiry.

Related Practices
Practice-as-Research Session:  Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance
Group Format: How Do We Dress for the Weather?

[[image]] Migration
Around the Table, Performative Intervention, Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin (2022).

Question

How do migration and sanctions shape everyday life, relationships across borders, and experiences of belonging?

Participatory Structure

Participants use autoethnographic writing, facilitated dialogue, and shared food to reflect on how migration and sanctions affect family relationships, mobility, work, access to resources, and connection to place.

The structure brings together people with direct experience of these conditions and people seeking to better understand their effects. Individual reflections become the basis for group conversation, allowing different experiences to remain distinct while identifying shared questions, recurring language, and possible forms of mutual support.

Possible Public Format

Depending on the site and participating communities, the research may develop into a facilitated dinner, participatory performance, public conversation, installation, or collectively narrated work.

Trace of the Process

With participants’ consent, written reflections, maps, recordings, and collectively composed texts may form a participant-authored record of the process.

Related Practices
Practice-as-Research Session: Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance
Group Format: Around the Table

[[image]] Cultural Displacement
Force with Force Chorus, Liebig 12 in Partnership with Vorspiel/Transmediale-CTM Berlin 2022
Zentrum fur Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin 2022

Question

How do forced migration, eviction, and housing insecurity shape experiences of home, refuge, and belonging?

Participatory Structure

Participants use autoethnographic writing, one-to-one encounters, and collective narration to examine how war, environmental disaster, gentrification, and other forms of displacement reshape relationships to home and place.

In group sessions, words and phrases connected to home and refuge are gathered and arranged into a shared vocal score. The process creates connections across different experiences of displacement without treating those experiences as equivalent.

Possible Public Format

Depending on the site and participating communities, the material may develop into a choral performance, sit-in, participatory assembly, installation, or collectively narrated work.

Trace of the Process

With participants’ consent, written reflections, recordings, and collective vocal scores may form a participant-authored record of the process.

Related Practices

Practice-as-Research Session:  Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance
Group Format: Force with Force Chorus 

[[image]] Diaspora
Visitors to the group exhibition Fear No Art: Civic Engagement, Histories, Currencies participate in a multilingual collective reading from a costume developed for To Be Seen & Unseen. San Diego Central Library Art Gallery, 2020. Curated by Lara Bullock.

Question

How do migration, political conflict, and restrictions on movement shape relationships across generations and borders?

Participatory Structure

Participants use autoethnographic writing, facilitated dialogue, translation, multilingual reading, and collective narration to examine how diasporic identities are shaped across different generations, places, and political contexts.

Participants contribute words, phrases, and reflections connected to family, memory, belonging, political disagreement, and distance. These materials are gathered on a shared object or surface and arranged into a multilingual group reading. The structure allows different experiences to be heard together without requiring consensus or reducing them to a single diasporic narrative.

Possible Public Format

Depending on the site and participating communities, the material may develop into a multilingual collective reading, choral performance, participatory installation, public assembly, or performative intervention within an exhibition.

Trace of the Process

With participants’ consent, written contributions, translations, annotated textiles or costumes, recordings, and collective scripts may form a participant-authored record of the process.

Related Practices

Practice-as-Research Session: Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance
Group Format: Multilingual Collective Reading from To Be Seen & Unseen

[[image]] transgenerational
Learning Farsi on 테헤란로 Teheran ro, Mare Culturale Urbano, Milan (2017)

Question

How do language dominance and inherited histories shape the ways care, belonging, and love are communicated across generations?

Participatory Structure

Participants use translanguaging, language exchange, autoethnographic writing, shared tea, and collective narration to explore how words, memories, and expressions of care move across languages.

During facilitated group gatherings, participants share words, phrases, and personal reflections in multiple languages and write short contributions on paper napkins. The napkins are arranged around bowls of sugar to create a shared installation. Participants may translate their contributions, explain their contexts, or allow certain words to remain untranslated.

Selections from the napkins are then read aloud collectively. The structure allows multiple languages and interpretations to coexist without requiring them to become a single unified narrative.

Possible Public Format

Depending on the site and participating communities, the material may develop into a multilingual tea gathering, participatory installation, choral reading, listening environment, or collectively narrated performance.

Trace of the Process

With participants’ consent, written napkins, translations, recordings, and collectively composed texts may form a participant-authored record of the process.

Related Practices
Practice-as-Research Session: Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance

Group Format: Learning Farsi on 테헤란로 Teheran ro

[[image]] Move With US — visual score
Visual score from Move With US, mapping individual bodies, shared movement, and digital mediation, 2020.

Question

How do surveillance, visibility, and social norms shape queer and trans people’s experiences of safety, bodily autonomy, and collective expression?

Participatory Structure

Participants use autoethnographic writing, facilitated dialogue, collective movement, and interactive media to examine how queer and trans bodies are watched, categorized, regulated, or made visible in public and digital spaces.

During group sessions, participants generate words and gestures connected to being seen, remaining unseen, feeling exposed, finding safety, and exercising the right to refuse. These contributions are developed into shared movement scores exploring consent, witnessing, bystander action, and collective care.

A participatory dance environment allows individual gestures to enter and transform the collective score. Each participant determines their level of visibility, physical participation, and documentation. No one is required to disclose their identity or personal experiences.

Possible Public Format

Depending on the site and participating communities, the material may develop into a participatory dance gathering, collective movement score, interactive installation, facilitated public assembly, or co-authored video work.

Trace of the Process

With participants’ consent, written reflections, movement scores, recordings, and video excerpts may form a participant-authored record of the process. Conditions of access, ownership, and future use are determined with participants before any documentation is shared.

Related Practices
Practice-as-Research Session: Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance
Group Format: Move with US

[[image]] gender equality
Parricida, one-to-one performance examining maternal lineage, naming, and patriarchal inheritance. Iranian Women’s Studies Foundation Conference, Teatro La Compagnia, Florence, Italy, 2017.

Question

How do naming systems, family lineage, and inherited gender roles shape whose histories are carried forward and whose remain unrecognized?

Participatory Structure

Participants use autoethnographic writing, lineage mapping, facilitated dialogue, and collective narration to examine how family names, chosen names, caregiving roles, and gendered expectations shape identity and belonging.

During group sessions, participants map names, histories, and relationships they have inherited, changed, rejected, or chosen. They may work with actual, altered, or invented names and are not required to disclose private family information.

Individual maps and reflections become material for a shared reading, visual score, or movement score exploring patriarchal inheritance, collective care, and alternative understandings of lineage.

Possible Public Format

Depending on the site and participating communities, the material may develop into a participatory lineage map, choral reading, sound and photography installation, facilitated public assembly, or collectively narrated performance.

Trace of the Process

With participants’ consent, lineage maps, written reflections, recordings, photographs, and collectively composed texts may form a participant-authored record of the process.

Related Practices
Practice-as-Research Session: Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance
Source Practice: Parricida