Presented by CAO Collective, LACE & FCCW
Saturday, March 21, 2–5PM
FCCW: 3053 Rosslyn St. LA CA 90065
Info on our space here
Max participants: 30
Free
CAO’s collective poetry-writing workshops have engaged over 300 community members of the Sinophone diaspora transnationally. CAO Collective carefully designs guiding questions on queer/feminist kinship, food, and memory, to which each participant starts on one page and turns to the next page(s) to continue what other people have written. These queer feminist poetics are intimate conversations with each other, holding space for joy, grief, and otherwise inexplicable feelings living in diaspora. This workshop focuses on QBIPOC folx, but all identities are welcome!
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 creates art to empower relational community healing. They make space for nuanced narratives rooted in China, the Sinophone diaspora, and other experiences from the margins. As cultural organizers, they explore social justice-oriented theorizing and narrativizing through communal and processual art practices. Their interdisciplinary praxis interweaves collective poetry, performance, food art, clay, photography, sound, video, children’s games, meditation, herbal medicine, and installation. Their works investigate systems of discipline, control, censorship, and capitalist extraction and reimagine memory/memorials, rituals, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship to (re)build sustainable community infrastructures. They explore the idea of languaging as a moving and fluid site, a contact zone for improvisation.
hú-tu (huiyin zhou & Laura Dudu 嘟嘟) is an artist duo with backgrounds in social practice and anthropology, working across moving image, photography, performance, and collaborative writing. Since 2020, huiyin and Laura have collaborated on over 40 performances, workshops, and exhibitions exploring diasporic queer identity, family memory, generational trauma, and collective grief through ritualistic and community-centered processes. Dedicated to multidisciplinary art and transnational organizing, Laura and huiyin co-founded and co-direct the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草. They also facilitate the Survivors Anchoring Art Narrative Garden (SAANG Project 春风吹), a co-creative, imaginative land for sexual and racial abuse survivors. h tu creates spaces of co-living and collective rest to (re)imagine and (re)learn intimacy and collective survival. Working with material, affective, residual, and conceptual presences, their works speak on/into the potential of intimate knowledge production. Responding to each others’ dream journals and familial photo/video archives, their ongoing project explores memory and home-making through a diasporic queer lens. huiyin and Laura have been awarded residencies at Bunker Projects, Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL), Durham Art Guild, BRIClab, Pedantic Arts, and Feminist Incubator. Their work has received support from BRIC, Raleigh Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Queens Art Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Asian American Arts Alliance, Durham Arts Council, and beyond.
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) champions artists, curators, and cultural workers who explore and defy boundaries through socially-engaged projects. We provide platforms within and beyond our space for diverse communities to connect deeply with challenging contemporary art.