Saturdays: Oct 18, Oct 25, Nov 1, 11AM–2PM
FCCW: 3053 Rosslyn St. LA CA 90065
Info on our space here
Max capacity: 10 each session
Free
As part of Silvi Naçi’s AIR project, skin to sky: radical play as resistance, these three collaborative workshops will transform acts of gathering, memory, and joy into a collective artwork—rooted in alternative photographic processes and guided by the spirit of communal making.
We warmly invite those who identify as queer and trans people of color to co-create a large-scale cyanotype — a luminous blueprint created through sunlight exposure — using our bodies and personally meaningful objects holding memory archived into them.
Participants are asked to bring small, non-fragile objects that have distinct silhouettes, forms, shapes — they can also be organic bodies/shapes. Through this process, we’ll explore how image-making can function as both an archive and a gathering, and how the act of play can offer profound strategies for reimagining freedom, solidarity, and creative resilience.
The co-created cyanotypes will later be transformed into a series of hand-crafted kites, which will be assembled and flown together in a second participatory workshop. The act of kite flying becomes a gesture of playful resistance and connection in relation — a way of reclaiming exchange, autonomy, play, and resistance in solidarity.
The kites will eventually return to the FCCW space as part of a final exhibition, embodying the arc of the residency through collaboration, embodiment, memory, archive, and material transformation.
We are offering three dates of the same workshop, so sign up for the one that works best for you! And please keep in mind that we need sunlight to create the images, so be prepared to be in the sun!
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Silvi Naçi is a queer Albanian educator, artist, researcher, and writer working between Albania and Tongva and Chumash territory, colonized as Los Angeles. Their praxis engages the image and its politics across photography, performance, moving-image, text, weaving, drawing, and installation. Their work examines how the marginalized body is affected by an oppressive state, the subtle and violent ways that migration results from colonialism, and how processes of decolonization affect and reshape a people, the body, language, and possibilities of gender identity.
Naçi holds a dual BFA in Fine Arts & Graphic Design from Suffolk University and an MFA in Photography & Media from California Institute of the Arts. They have exhibited works at Manifesta 14 Prishtina, XK; National Gallery of Art, Tirana, AL; The National Gallery of Kosovo, XK; Grand Hotel, Kosovo, XK; Other Places Art Fair, LA; Greater LA MFA Exhibition, LA; and is a recipient of the Tim Disney Excellence in Storytelling Prize and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Travel Grant. Their writing on art criticism has been published in Artsy, East of Borneo, Contemporary Art Review LA, X-TRA, Big Red & Shiny, NKA Journal for Contemporary African Art, and Hunter Fashion Magazine. Naçi has participated in residency at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA); Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (Berlin, Germany); Elsewhere Museum and Residency (Greensboro, NC); Évora NAU (Évora, Portugal); Vermont Studio Center (VT); perfocraZe International Artist Residency (Kumasi, Ghana), and the Feminist Center for Creative Work residency (Los Angeles, CA). Naçi is a doctoral student in the Global Studies department at UCI. Find more info on their work at silverprojects.co or follow them on Instagram @silvi.naci.