if we choose to reclaim ourselves from the ashes (a eulogy turned dance hall)
print-based installation, performance, and dance hall | Lainer Family Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 2022
If we choose… calls on those who gather within it to reclaim ourselves, our labor, our joy, and our agency from the arms and aims of the power-hoarding institutions that we constitute. Through public, celebratory, and intimate modes of gathering, the project aims to hold space for grief and necessary processes of release within this period of collective undoing. Through our gathering—our being with and bearing witness—we make a portal for reclaiming ourselves from the ashes of the world as we know it.
Within the remnants of the party, in the weeks following the opening celebration, community members are invited to participate in Chrysalis Sessions, programs hosted by the Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry. Event details are subject to change pending COVID-19 safety precautions.
Chrysalis Sessions hosted by Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry
Dance Jam with Dancing Through Prison Walls
The first in-person iteration of Dancing Through Prison Walls’ weekly dance jam co-hosted by choreographer Suchi Branfman and a crew of formerly incarcerated and “free world” folks who have been dancing together virtually since March 2020. Coffee and cookies provided by our friends Skid Row Coffee.
Parsing our Exits as Care: Queer Funerals and Post-Life Practicalities
Using a queer anarchist lens, Parsing our Exits as Care: Queer Funerals & Post-Life Practicalities invites those who gather within it, as readers and/or workshop participants, to parse out intentions around death & funerals.
Lets (re)imagine our exits: deaths & funerals—as an act of care towards our loved ones, communities, and selves. How can confronting death’s inevitability yield agency for queers today? In this workbook, readers are invited to address components of post-life: from will-writing to digital asset management to commemorative playlists, and on.
Parsing our Exits as Care emerged from the workshop developed by Emary Parisi and Harumi Miura as part of our 2022 Chrysalis Sessions hosted at University of California, Los Angeles and can be used independently of or within the workshop space.