Embedded Files
Session Objective: to recentre cosmologies that have been sidelined by dualistic thinking, modernisation, and globalisation
Unit 3 has been examining the power of underrepresented stakeholders, considering how we can better recognise and amplify the agency of marginalised actors. Art is a common tool in that work...and so your next major Climates of Resistance assignment is to tap into that tradition, producing your own piece of Agency Artwork as a Radical Recognition Report.
This session will help you prepare for the assignment by exploring various mediums for art and some of the ways that non-traditional actors are given a platform through music, poetry, painting, and more.
Learning from Art
“Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.”
– Alice Walker
Consider: the “Reason Men Build Walls” by féi hernandez, published in Poetry, March 2020. While you read, think about how the narrator finds power in their refusal to be limited by binaries, borders, and boundaries.
My lover fears me.
There is too much cumbia,
too much Selena in my walk.
Too much Frank Ocean in my lovin’,
too much storm in our summer kiss.
I am too-much-sugar-pyramid on his tongue,
too-much-Holy-Spirit, too many ancestors
talking in a crowded room.
My lover fears me:
he only sees threat in my soil-brown
eyes: a pending earthquake,
a possession or a steep cliff, his imminent dive out the closet.
He fears the nature of my wild harvest,
the way I am hard fruit cracked open, soft
inside, and his body drools.
He is not used to the howling woman on the tip of my tongue,
not used to myth being truth.
Of course I’m a threat. My pulping heart is a caution
sign, a red light he dare not cross because
he is not a man used to the elements,
the ways of the Earth:
the way my love like fire ignites a forest,
my presence lifts him between
his thighs like wind does dust—
he is not used to a transient, borderless caress
like sound bath or universe energy cascading into
cranium, jolting him into dance with me in bed
past nirvana and all of God’s children.
He is a coward—a divide that swore
it would let me travel across its height without papeles (papers).
My lover is a conditioned man since the start of time,
a colonizer that fears the Pima Indian
in me, the eagle, the flight, the ritual of me.
He fears the too-bare earth-child, the savage,
the Tarahumara in me, fears the too-bare lepe in me:
the too-masculine, female coalescence that makes me a god:
the healer and warrior in me.
He tried to sever parts of me during his inner war:
tried to slice me with his love like a molten silver sword,
he tried to fling my soft womb inflamed into abyss,
but with my too-much-bidi-bidi-bom-bom in my hip
too-much-Frank-Ocean in my lovin’,
being too-much-divine and storm in the summer,
being too good of a serpentine shapeshifter,
I dodged and shattered a fragile masculinity.
I, the two spirit beast, am the reason why men build
walls, borders on their fingertips. I am the catalyst for why
men don’t shed tears, don’t open up.
To lovers I will always be a wild criatura, danger, a disease,
a howling spirit, a haunted house,
awakening, awakening, awakening
and God forbid I awaken a man in our era of silence and crosses.
Yet, although the man that swore he loved me left runnin’,
abandoned me, wings outstretched, crown in hand,
I hair-flipped knowing that silence
is the only way men will ever know how to love
because a freedom like me exists.
féi hernandez was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and is a trans, Inglewood-raised, immigrant artist, writer, and healer. They are a Define American Fellow for 2021 and was awarded the 2021 Public Art Rogers Park Artist in Residency in Inglewood, California. They are currently the Board President of Gender Justice Los Angeles and is the author of the full-length poetry collection Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications 2020) which was on NPR’s Best Books of 2020. féi collects Pokémon plushies. (Photograph by Julian Sambrano.)
Listen: to this poem by Terisa Siagatonu addressing her intersectionality between climate justice, identity, and colonialism. Siagatonu breaks down several dichotomies: Ocean versus Land; coloniser versus colonised; home versus threat. She also speaks of the Pacific Ocean as a living being and recognises its agency – a power that has created both negative and positive impacts for her.
read Atlas
If you open up any atlas
and take a look at a map of the world,
almost every single one of them
slices the Pacific Ocean in half.
To the human eye, most maps center
all the land masses on Earth
creating the illusion
that water can handle the butchering
and be pushed to the edges
of the world.
As if the Pacific Ocean isn’t the largest body
living today, beating the loudest heart,
the reason why Land has a pulse in the first place.
The audacity one must have to create a visual
so violent as to assume that
nobody comes from water
so nobody will care
what you do with it
and yet,
people came from land,
are still coming from land,
and look what was done to them.
When people ask me where I’m from,
they don’t believe me when I say water.
So instead, I tell them that home is a machete
and that I belong to places
that don’t belong to themselves anymore —
— broken and butchered places that have made me
a hyphen of a woman:
a Samoan-American that carries the weight of both
colonizer and colonized,
both blade and blood.
Samoa, stolen.
California, stolen.
California, nestled on the western coast
of the most powerful country on this planet.
Samoa, an island so microscopic on a map,
it’s no wonder people doubt its existence.
California, a state of emergency
away from having the drought
rid it of all its water.
Samoa, a state of emergency
away from becoming a saltwater cemetery
if the waters don’t stop rising.
When people ask me where I’m from,
what they want is to hear me speak of land.
What they want is to know
where I go once I leave here.
The audacity people must have to assume that home is just a destination, and not the panic
Not the constant migration
that the panic gives birth to.
What is it like?
To know that home is something
that is waiting for you to return to it?
What does it mean to belong to
something that isn’t sinking?
What does it mean to belong to the very thing that is causing the flood?
So many of us come from water
but when you come from water
no one believes you
Colonization keeps laughing
global warming is grinning
all at your grief:
How you mourn the loss of a home
that isn’t even gone yet
That no one believes you’re from
How everyone is beginning to
hear more about your islands
but only in the context of
vacations and honeymoons
football and military life
exotic women
exotic fruit
exotic beaches
but never asks about the rest of its body
The water, the Ocean that it comes from
The reason why it’s sinking
no one visualizes the Pacific Islands as
actually being there
you explain
and explain
and clarify
and fix their
incorrect pronunciation
and explain
until they realize just how vast your Ocean is
how microscopic your islands look in it
how easy it is to miss when
looking on a map of the world
excuses people make
for why they didn’t see it before
Terisa Siagatonu is an award-winning poet, teaching artist, mental health educator, and community leader born and rooted in the Bay Area. Her presence in the poetry world as a queer Samoan woman and activist has granted her opportunities to perform and speak in places ranging from The White House to the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris. She campaigns for youth advocacy, educational attainment, Pacific Islander/Indigenous rights, action on climate change, LGBTQQIA rights, and an end to gender-based violence.
Terisa holds a Bachelors degree in Community Studies and minor in Education from the University of California-Santa Cruz and a Masters Degree in Marriage/Family Therapy from the University of Southern California, aiming to use her background as a mental health clinician and poet to bridge the gaps in our quest for collective healing and liberation.
Immerse: yourself in this collaboration between poet Deshawn McKinney and percussionist Beibei Wang, which premiered in the midst of lockdown during a Tangram Voices concert supporting the Black and African Solidarity Show (B.A.S.S.).
about the event, which was held in June 2020:
We as Tangram stand in solidarity with Black people and allies around the world protesting against racial injustice. The vision we work toward as a new music collective – a future in which Chinese and Western cultures are no longer assumed to be mutually exclusive, in which geopolitical tensions give way to a culture of listening and human connection – would not be possible without the movement for Black lives. We as transnational Asians would not be where we are, empowered to create and live the way we do, without the leadership of Black intellectuals, artists, and activists who have done the brave, dangerous work of revealing the violence of white supremacy. They have created an invaluable impact by calling for justice in our systems, and shifting our culture towards morality. We feel the deepest gratitude for this legacy, and will strive to do everything we can to honor and support that legacy through our work.
We have donated all proceeds from our Tangram Voices launch concert to the Black & African Solidarity Show. B.A.S.S. is an inspiring platform, curated for and by Black minds, which holds love, creativity and education at its core. Through the unity of their diversity, they exist as a transcultural representation of Blackness. Their mission is to hold space for Black joy across the world.
Deshawn McKinney is a writer proudly reppin the northside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Deshawn’s work focuses on the liberation of all intersections of Black people and their identities, and building coalition across peoples and movements to create sustainable, proactive, and effective bases of power. He utilises art, grounded in hip-hop, as a tool to invite folks into the conversation and disrupt the status quo.
Deshawn holds a Master in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Master in Creative Writing – Poetry from the University of East Anglia. His chapbook, father forgive me, was published in 2021 by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press.
Beibei Wang is an internationally acclaimed percussion virtuoso based in London. She has been heralded by the Wall Street Journal for her “high-energy virtuosity” and by The New York Times for her “flamboyant” performance style. She was listed in the top 50 Chinese musicians in the “Sound of East” project by the Chinese Ministry of Culture in 2014. In 2015, she was endorsed by Arts Council England, receiving an Exceptional Talent visa from the British Government. Since 2008, Beibei has been featured as a soloist in world-renowned composer Tan Dun’s Organic Music Trilogy, collaborating with orchestras worldwide, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra UK and the China Philharmonic. Recently, her music was broadcasted on BBC Radio 3 Late Junction. She currently leads a traditional Chinese percussion course at SOAS and University of Birmingham.
Appreciate: the work of Roberto Lugo, whose art transgresses normal conventions of medium and message.
Pottery Saved My Life
Roberto Lugo is an American artist, ceramicist, social activist, spoken word poet, and educator. Lugo uses porcelain as his medium of choice, illuminating its aristocratic surface with imagery of poverty, inequality, and social and racial injustice. Lugo’s works are multicultural mash-ups, traditional European and Asian porcelain forms and techniques reimagined with a 21st-century street sensibility. Their hand-painted surfaces feature classic decorative patterns and motifs combined with elements of modern urban graffiti and portraits of individuals whose faces are historically absent on this type of luxury item - people like Sojourner Truth, Dr. Cornel West, and The Notorious BIG, as well as Lugo’s family members and, very often, himself. Lugo holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Penn State. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, among others. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture
Recall: the fourth Learning Objective for this course, which is to interpret expressions of non-traditional agency produced by underrepresented parties in environmental action and policy. You have begun doing that by critically examining dichotomies, power, and agency....and today’s materials are a good source of inspiration for you while producing your second major assignment.
Examine: the Assignment Brief for your Agency Artwork as a Radical Recognition Report. Start to brainstorm what stakeholder you might want to showcase and how you can represent them.
Assignment Details: the Agency Artwork should summarise student learning on Radical Recognition by:
recognising a community, group, or system that is underrepresented in mainstream spaces;
interpreting some of the ways that actor displays and exerts agency; and
amplifying that party’s “voice” by highlighting them and their power through painting, poem, song, sculpture, digital animation, or another medium of students’ choosing.
For more information and full grading criteria, see https://www.climatesofresistance.org/assignment/artwork.
while you brainstorm, it might be helpful to...
Explore: the Chapter House’s artistic collection for World Water Day, which was curated by Emma Robbins from the Navajo Water Project...and features ceramics from Syracuse’s own Alec Rovensky. As you poke around the online exhibition, appreciate how many different forms of ‘art’ are included, and how many of them explicitly showcase non-human actors. Pay attention to how the pieces identify inequalities and injustices while emphasising power, capacity, and the potential of collective action.
chapter house ['chap-tәr 'haūs] noun
1. On the Navajo Nation, a municipality’s seat of government.
2. A community center where chapter residents of all ages meet, discuss community issues, attend classes, participate in walks and runs, and receive assistance like food, water, or medical and veterinary services.
While we can’t physically come together during this pandemic, we at The Chapter House are providing a virtual space for Indigenous Peoples and allies to appreciate art, convene and collaborate, celebrate individual and shared Indigenous cultures, and explore the complexities of the 21st Century Indigenous experience.
This is a space for Indigenous empowerment and community, but all who share a desire for universal empowerment are welcome here.
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