About the event
Join Layla Zami, Jill Strauss, Jaime Shearn Coan, Oxana Chi and Iemanjá Brown for a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural event in an innovative and open format featuring dance, talks, poetry, film excerpts and music.
How do we access the past from a present perspective and in the hope of a future? This event explores the role of the body in embodying historical trauma, and in performing and transforming sociopolitical relations. Bringing together artists and scholars of diverse gender identities and various backgrounds (including Jewish European, Italian-American, and African-European), this evening centers the relations between individual and institutional archival processes. Building from the experiences gained at the International Symposium: Moving Memory organized by Layla Zami and Oxana Chi at Technical University in Berlin in 2016, this international gathering offers scholars, students, artists, and any interested individuals the possibility to learn, exchange, and network.
PROGRAM
Poetry: We are so full with it
Iemanja Brown – Poet, Activist, Ph.D. Candidate at CUNY GC
Talk: How to See Black Space in Total Whiteness: Taisha Paggett's underwaters (we is ready, we is ready) and the 2014 Whitney Biennial
Jaime Shearn Coan – Writer, Mellon Digital Publics Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate at CUNY GC
Talk: What does it mean to perforMemory? Transcultural, transnational and transhistorical moves in Oxana Chi's dance solo Through Gardens
Dr. Layla Zami – Independent Scholar, Resident Artist with Oxana Chi & Ensemble Xinren,
Assistant Producer at the International Human Rights Art Festival
Dance Performance: Through Gardens (excerpt)
In memory of the Chinese-Jewish-Latvian artist Tatjana Barbakoff (1899-1944)
Oxana Chi – Dancer, Choreographer, Filmmaker, Curator, Author, Mentor
Music by Laszlo Moldvai, Costume by Anjolita Arvandi and Huang Ning Fen
Keynote: The Michelfeld Jewish Cemetery as Living Archive and a Transatlantic Journey in Search of Accountability, Visibility and (Hopefully) Reconciliation in a Small German Town
Dr. Jill Strauss – Assistant Professor at CUNY BMCC, Department of Speech, Communication and Theatre Arts
Open Discussion
Further Readings:
Iemanja Brown, 'we are so full with it', in Kaf 1: Mourning Tent (Edited by Miriam Atkin, Tom Haviv, Rami Karim & Öykü Tekten), Spring 2017 http://www.kafcollective.com/journal/
Oxana Chi (Ed.), Tanzende Erinnerungen - Mémoire dansée. Femmage an die Tänzerin Tatjana Barbakoff. Katalog zur Ausstellung in der Galerie Gondwana im Rahmen von Salon Qi. Berlin: li:chi e.V., 2011. www.oxanachi.de
Jaime Shearn Coan, 'How to See Black Space in Total Whiteness: taisha paggett's underwaters (we is ready, we is ready) and the 2014 Whitney Biennial,' in TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 61, Number 3, Fall 2017 (T235), pp. 72-93.
Jill Strauss and Dionne Ford (Eds.), Shared Legacies: Narratives of Race and Reconciliation by Descendants of Enslavers and the Enslaved, Rutgers University Press, upcoming in 2019.
Layla Zami, Contemporary PerforMemory: Moving Through Diasporic Dancescapes in the 21st Century, Berlin: Humboldt-University, 2018. www.laylazami.net
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality (IRWGS) at Columbia University, and the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
