MEDICINE TONGUE
2020
online
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collaborative facilitation
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community engagement
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interdisciplinary workshop
This series of online workshops was developed in collaboration with artists Cory Tamler and Lilah Akins. Our relationships to our respective cultures—as Jews, as Native and settler people—have come to us each through fragments: scraps of ritual and song, totemic objects, the body’s response to ancestral waters, a piece of an archive that claims us. Our aim was to bring participants into experiences of intercultural connection and sacred sharing, despite our pandemic-necessitated separation.
Over the course of two interconnected but standalone sessions, we explored fragments from our personal archives and deeply personal fragments from “the archive” together. Participants were asked to bring their own fragments with them to the workshop (i.e. objects passed down to you, grocery lists/recipes, pieces of cloth, photographs, memories they’ve transcribed), and received other fragments through the mail. Through writing, movement, and play, each participant wove their collected pieces into three-dimensional altar-collages and stories that were shared over video with the other participants.
collaborators/co-facilitators: Tyler Rai, Cory Tamler and Lilah Akins
Presented with the support of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship and In Kinship Fellowship.