[[image]] Climate Change

Artistic Education: Practice-as-Research in the Arts & Humanities
One-to-One Performance: This Story Doesn’t Begin With Me
Group Format: How Do We Dress for the Weather?

This project assists in mobilizing efforts advocating for anti-racist practices to form wider networks of coalitions challenging systemic inequalities within BIPOC communities. The one-to-one performances apply trauma-informed practices, addressing the impact of the war on racialized bodies and other forms of race-based violence that contribute to reinforcing segregation and disembodiment. During the one-to-one performances, participants will be invited to create identity cards that reflect categories of where they belong or desire to be geographically. By situating one’s identity in relation to the ecological environment, rather than paradigms of Whiteness, participants begin to shed layers of masks that are constructed and produced while performing a divided self-perception.

An integrative approach shifting collective unconsciousness to collective catharsis is activated through movement activities in the next phase of programming. In a collaborative learning environment, participants are invited to practice simple choreography merging pedestrian movement with iconic images representative of ‘ideal bodies’ in classical and modern art. To further problematize these normative social constructs and the colonial paradigms that uphold them, participants will experiment with vocalizing technostrategic language used to justify war and other forms of aggression by defense intellectuals. This subversive approach to vocalizing physical and psychological anguish, which can be traced to the bodily impact of environmental hazards, reorients participants’ bodies toward creating and embodying new gestures and language that reflect cultural and social expressions of resistance. The objective is to show the interconnectedness: violence done to the body is violence done to the earth. 

This durational performance is meant to be staged as a performative intervention during town hall meetings, protests, and parades.

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

Artistic Education: Performative Interventions in Contexts of Collective Action
Group Format: Around the Table

This community-building project brings together people who have been directly affected by migration and sanctions, as well as concerned citizens who have not experienced these challenges firsthand but want to intervene with support. For those directly impacted, the curriculum’s approach to applying autoethnographic methods provides tools to address the multifaceted intercultural and economic issues arising from migration and sanctions. Simultaneously, for concerned citizens who haven’t faced these hardships, the learning outcomes of collective practices foster empathy and awareness in a collaborative environment where multiple perspectives can engage in meaningful dialogue to create a more inclusive society. By cultivating social connection using the format of a dinner party, the group format of this project generates a sense of belonging and emotional support, empowering people to collectively navigate the complex impact of migration and sanctions on their lives while advocating for their rights and well-being.

[[image]] Cultural Displacement

Artistic Education: Performative Interventions in Contexts of Collective Action
One-to-One Performance: This Story Doesn’t Begin with Me
Group Format: Force with Force Chorus 

This project cultivates forms of solidarity among people who have experienced forced migration or eviction due to causes such as invasion, war, environmental disasters, or gentrification, by locating intersections across these conflicts. The one-to-one performances apply trauma-informed practices to address the impact of displacement and other forms of economic-based violence that contribute to housing insecurity. During the one-to-one performances, participants create identity cards reflecting categories indicating where they belong or with whom they desire to be.

The collaborative learning environment within this group format promotes acceptance of diverse perspectives regarding the definitions of home and engages in socially intimate dialogue about what it means to find refuge. Participants will activate their learnings from the curriculum by incorporating the terms and phrases that were used to define home and refuge to reframe traumatic narratives related to exile or evictions. The intervention concludes by collectively narrating the terms and phrases out loud in order to co-create a narrative that reimagines a world where private property and borders of nation states do not divide people but connect them.

This performative intervention can be staged as a choral concert or sit-in.

[[image]] Diaspora
Participants of the group exhibition Fear No Art: Civic Engagement, Histories, Currencies at the San Diego Central Library Art Gallery collectively narrate participants' experiences from the performance series To Be Seen & Unseen on a costume worn by the performers. San Diego, California, 2020. Curated by Lara Bullock.

Artistic Education: Practice-as-Research in the Arts & Humanities
Group Format: Every Four Years & Dancing Through the Diaspora

This project helps repair and preserve social and emotional bonds across multiple generations of immigrants and their children. The curriculum’s tools and activities provide resources for addressing divisive issues that often lead to conflict within diasporic families and communities, whose identities have been shaped differently due to punitive governmental policies in both their country of origin and host country. The collaborative learning environment of the participatory performance lecture encourages the group to examine how their identity is formed in relation to multiple cultural contexts. It also supports participants in identifying and articulating the limitations of freedom that legal protection might not offer dual or new citizens. This includes unpacking the complexity of travel bans and sanctions that complicate relationships between loved ones residing in another country. The participatory performance lecture serves as a bridge to build trust and social connection among communities divided by direct political violence, so the shared experience provides participants mutual understanding to use as a foundation for the next phase of programming, a collaborative workshop. 

Activities in the collaborative workshop encourages diasporic transnational mobilization by focusing on actionable steps members of a diaspora community, dispersed across multiple countries or regions, can take to advocate for causes significant to their shared cultural, ethnic, religious, or national identity. These activities address dangers of exposure in various forms of activism, including but not limited to virtual advocacy and community organizing, by encouraging the creation of context-specific efforts that adhere within the boundaries of laws in both countries. This involves careful consideration of mapping plans of coordination and communication across different countries or regions to leverage the resources, networks, and shared identities of the diaspora community to address issues that matter to them and their homelands. The goal is to define particular roles that reduce risk in advocating for social justice, human rights, and the well-being of diaspora members and their countries of origin.

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

Artistic Education: Performative Interventions in Contexts of Collective Action
One-to-One Performance: Learning Farsi on 테헤란로 Teheran ro
Group Format: Force with Force Chorus

This project involves a series of one-to-one performances exploring challenges that families and communities face due to language dominance. Through the process of translanguaging and language exchange, participants are invited to share a conversation about experiencing acceptance and interconnectedness in their daily lives. Participants are invited to write their reflections about these experiences on paper napkins. This form of documentation will be presented as a co-created artwork, with napkins exhibited around bowls of sugar. Guests are invited to sit on a pillow, enjoy tea with participants, and read reflections on the napkins.The guests are invited to collaborate with participants on the next phase of programming.

The collaborative learning environment of this group format encourages participants to embrace diverse perspectives on identity formation and engage in meaningful dialogue about differences in interpretations of intergenerational histories. Participants will activate their learnings from the curriculum and take actionable steps toward reframing traumatic narratives passed down from previous generations by co-creating shared narratives that incorporate terms and phrases of multiple languages. The intervention concludes by collectively narrating the terms and phrases out loud in order to co-create a larger narrative that expresses and communicates multiple layers of how love can be defined, communicated, and shared in multiple languages.

[[image]] LGBTQIA

Artistic Education: Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance
One-to-One Performance: To Be Seen & Unseen
Group Format: Move with US

Through a series of one-to-one performances, this project initiates discussions about forms of social control and other aggressive practices that pervade societies targeting people identifying as  LGBTQIA+. Reflections on these experiences and other prevalent issues related to homophobic and transphobic violence during the one-to-one performances will be documented on a detachable part of the costume participants wore. This artwork will be displayed for public viewing. Guests will be invited to read the participants’ narratives out loud in the exhibition space. This activity will initiate a solution-building discussion about countering discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity through bystander action.

To experiment with practices that strengthen ways to counter discrimination and form a deeper connection between participants of the one-to-one performances and exhibition guests, participants will apply learning outcomes from the course curriculum by reactivating performative methods in the practice-as-research methodology while facilitating a participatory dance party with exhibition guests. In a joyful and attentive atmosphere, participants and guests will explore the concept of nonviolence through a series of physical movements that resist oppression enforced by normative categories of identification. By connecting to their bodies through collective movement and expression, participants will discover ways to identify beyond normative categories through the notion of transindividuality.

Reflecting on transitions between self-awareness and one’s connection to the collective, while simultaneously interfacing with interactive multimedia technology, the group will gain insight into how their actions, when performed, evolve into embodied modes of interdependent communication, thought, and movement. Using interactive multimedia technology enhances the capacity to perceive the transformation of self-identification within social and technological contexts and connects the awareness of interdependency to practices that elevate the visibility of horizontal conditions between human and non-human beings.

Experiences will be documented as a co-authored video artwork that the group will collectively own.  This project can be conducted in-person, virtually, or in a hybrid format.

[[image]] gender equality
Parricida, One-to-One- performance, Mare Culturale Urbano, Milan (2017).

Artistic Education: Autoethnography: Composing Experience Through Performance
One-to-One Performance: Parricida
Group Format: Formulations of Assembly

Through a series of one-to-one performances, this project invites focused discussions about advancing women’s rights by deconstructing widely accepted social norms that attempt to define and control what constitutes a woman and prescribe certain behaviors. Centered around enacting strategies that resist paternalism through acts of collective care, the one-to-one performances engage conversations about diverse interpretations of feminism seeking to link values of gender equality with other shared transnational struggles.

Outcomes of the one-to-one performances will be presented as an exhibition of photography and soundscapes that amplify personal histories that are often underrecognized, misrepresented, and framed as stories of suffering. The active listening component of playing soundscapes in the installation works to shift guests’ levels of awareness of social conventions that replicate patriarchal norms.