rongin shagor/রঙিন সাগর | Embodying Community: A Small-Group Pillow Talk with ALICE YUAN ZHANG 张元

How does the diasporic body transmit, sense, and cache memories of community? Explore this inquiry together with an intimate group of POC at Embodying Community, a peer-learning gathering hosted by artist Alice Yuan Zhang at Oyoun. We will start by reading the Afro-German poet and activist May Ayim’s poem “Community”, which is the focal point for Rongin Shagor’s call for artists’ responses. Referencing ancestral technologies, the artist invites her acupuncturist Y Thuan La to virtually facilitate an embodied grounding exercise and answer questions related to traditional Eastern healing methods. From there, we will share mugwort tea and snacks while mapping how our bodies may act as routers for community in both subjective and shared ways. 

Embodying Community is part of Alice’s open reflection process in response to Oyoun’s project Rongin Shagor, which invites an assemblage of voices on cultural memory in context of coloniality, displacement, and resistance in Berlin and beyond. Drawing from her Buddhist upbringing, Alice considers the body as a site for re-membering vital connections to place, people, and ecology. Her forthcoming work, titled Anatomy of an Intergenerational Router, will be an autofictional 3D representation of her own ancestral rituals and relations. 

Limited to self-identifying POC, 10-15.

Participants are invited to wear comfortable clothing and each bring a snack you would like to share with the group.

Registration here

About the Artists: 

_Alice Yuan Zhang 张元 

(b. Dalian, China) is a media artist, cultural organizer, and first-generation immigrant living between Los Angeles and Berlin. Her transdisciplinary practice operates on cyclical and intergenerational time. Along the peripheries of colonialist imagination, she works to bring technology down to earth by devising collective experiments in ancestral remembering, interspecies pedagogy, and networked solidarity.

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_Y Thuan La

is a Board Licensed Acupuncturist and Herbalist with a Master's Degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine from Yo San University. She is Queer and trans masculine-identified, and a refugee who is fluent in Cantonese, mandarin and English. In addition, she has taught Yoga for 10 years, and is a breast cancer survivor.

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CONTEXT

"Embodying Community" is part of rongin shagor/রঙিন সাগর, an artistic dialogue in which a series of multidisciplinary and multilingual artists respond to the poem "community" by May Ayim. The accompanying web platform will be launched on 13 November on a physical event happening at Oyoun, that will feature not only the artworks but also performances and a very special edition of "The Poetry Meets Series". Responses to the poem are by Kondo Heller, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Amira Zarari, Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç, Arijit Bhattacharyya, Bruna Barros and Jess Oliveira, Alice Yuan Zhang, Sara Ehsan, Carla Abiles, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, Jumoke Adeyanju and you...

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CREDITS

Artistic direction, concept: Madhumita Nandi
Curation: Madhumita Nandi, Anja Saleh
Curatorial assistance: Melisa Manrique
Communication: Tariq Bajwa
Design: Chhandak Pradhan
Funding/ Admin: Sophia Schmidt, Paul Räther, Nina Martin

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FUNDERS

The project rongin shagor is developed within the framework of "dive in. Program for Digital Interactions" of the Federal Cultural Foundation, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) in the NEUSTART KULTUR program and the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

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