Key Terms: beauty, upheaval, community, displacement, refuge, reflection, knowledge, inheritance, liminality, diaspora

MEETING MINUTES

This meeting saw presenters and participants stepping backwards (and forwards) through “routes of memory,” revealing speculative narratives of hope in unlikely places from apocalyptic futures to WWII incarceration camps.

Tiffany Chung was the first to discuss her work, retrospectively detailing her video entitled “thousands of years before and after.” The piece features a collective of drifters scavenging a ravaged potential future inspired by the contemporary climate crisis. This has been a significant theme in Chung’s work, including the greater “Galapagos Project” which “Thousands of Years…” is a part of. On choosing to symbolize the modern plight of forced eviction in east Asia (especially the working masses destined to suffer the greatest if humanity fails to act accordingly), Tiffany noted that “without hope we cease to exist.” Her hope is that her own work will succeed in highlighting the disparities between privilege and ruin, in an increasingly disparate society and ecology.

Zikri Rahman’s presentation moved the discussion towards a current day case study in discursive field work: his network of community libraries across Malaysia, which provide access to a wide variety of texts (some banned) which he hopes can expand access to hope itself. He poignantly remarked on the possibility that hope itself is not an equal-access resource; in providing what he referred to as an entire “alternate education” through “Buku Jalanan,” Zikri sees books as a tool to reclaim pedagogy itself. Chance encounters in the presence of great ideas, he said, will spark further enthusiasm in learning while providing space for more direct modes of community world-building action as well.

Disi and Christina shared their vision of contemporary solidarity as well, detailing the work of their Hong Hong-based Lausan Collective. Inspired by the unique geopolitical circumstance that mires Hong Kong in an imperative anti-colonial struggle, Lausan’s aim has been to provide a platform for leftist thought within the country as well as strengthen international awareness and support for activists on the ground. They shared their video, “at night, i forget how to speak” – a tour of Hong Kong streets as they would have been experienced in the midst of anti-establishment protests in the previous year, which served to reconstruct protest routes that could have otherwise become ephemeral sacrifices lost to time. The subject of liminality was especially crucial in understanding both Lausan Collective’s perspective as representatives of the diaspora, as well as the status of Hong Kong as a whole. With the benefit of hindsight, the moment of hope captured in their video seems to have been rendered somewhat obsolete by later events, and yet an unsure hope remains that the diaspora will remain steadfast, and (as it has already proved capable of) continue to find new innovative forms of dissent to fuel continual change.

TT Takemoto then led the group back in time, asking the group to imagine the life of one Jiro, an incarcerated Japanese American during the second world war who was boldly portrayed by TT Takemoto. Their performance was then immortalized in the experimental film “Looking for Jiro” in 2011, doing a great archival justice to the underserved life story of her character’s namesake, Jiro Onuma. Their larger body of work continues to explore the complicated physical and psychic labor involved in assimilation, from the standpoints of both race and gender/sexual identity.

Naz Cuguoğlu closed the conversation by recommending the work of two Turkish artists, one of them being “Candle #4.” The video’s straightforward depiction of two individuals holding candles, perpetually blown out and relit by one another, speaks to how hope serves to connect different people and produce collaborative new ideas. A connective pedagogy is also what Naz has endeavored to provide with her curatorial work for Collective Çukurcuma, a collaborative workshop which further expands the working definition of ‘library.’ Inspired by the 2013 protests in Turkey’s Gezi Park (which themselves resulted in the opening of a community library on the site), Naz firmly believes that hope is always hiding where community gathers, and wondered in the discussion what the implications of creating these sorts of spaces to facilitate gathering will do for liberation movements across the world. And like many of the other artists who presented, she prompted the group to wonder if hope leaves some form of ‘residue’ – with ‘memory’ being our lone preliminary guess as to what that residue might be or behave like.

Notes taken by Katie Bruhn
Revised by Moises De La Cruz

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