artist talk, may 30, 2023

during IDHA’s seeding transformative community event

i’m really grateful to be here with you this evening and i’m now going to share a very brief video piece called ‘tell me what it’s like when i call you’ and following that the poem that the video piece takes its title from.

this poem was written during IDHA’s "Reclaiming our Wholeness: Art making workshop with Priya Dadlani" during the "Healing as Homecoming" festival last December, and is part of my forthcoming poetry chapbook called why would we want these names. it speaks to a practice of mine, sometimes intentional and at times spontaneous, of communicating with future versions of myself for clarity, direction or comfort, and of my disorientation, at times, over which way time, or progress, within myself and the world, moves. the video piece is a visual and auditory sketch representing scrying, communication with spirits beyond myself, and the liminal inner and outer landscapes these practices have at times led me to.

for me, both pieces hold the complexity of the boundarilessness of time, space, lineage, land, and a mournful, contemplative rage over a world that pathologizes my sensitivity to its horrors, and perhaps the ways i was conditioned to surrender to and replicate them even, as i seek care and calm. 

being in community with IDHA has deepened my healing and creative practices by helping me to articulate more clearly the contradictions within them. how do we find healing, how do we create art, within eugenicist capitalist colonialism? how has the context impacted our content or contentedness, and our abilities to create either? the focal landscape of my video piece was one i’d escaped to in 2021 for respite while in the throes of PMDD-induced mania. who among us on Turtle Island have the privilege to seek healing, and to create art in such spaces? amidst inaccessible, all-white campgrounds near military-industrial-complex sites in a notoriously policed state on the stolen land of the O'odham Jewed, Sobaipuri, Tohono O'odham and Hohokam, where what peace i found was often cut through by white straight cis-men target practicing with ARs, day and night.

the hrt i must take daily post-PMDD-surgery to control the self-severing violence of the mood disorder, on the hour or else, that enables me to present this art to you today, is made in apartheid israel. like many of you, i have never known care without contradiction and contention. but i don’t stop longing for it or for a future self who can tell me it’s coming, and better yet that i, in some small part, co-created it. the non-linear non-consensus realities that traditional mental healthcare would pathologize as an aspect of my psychosis, has guided me to and through these griefs, given me capacity to witness them and begin to be accountable to them. being in community with these spirits, in addition to community with all of you, gives me confidence in my questioning, “creation at what cost? healing at what cost?” 

i am proud and resolute in my cripness and madness so long as the racist, eugenicist status quo is named well and “sane”, and i’m so grateful to be in community with so many amazing souls dedicated to co-creating care spaces where i, and those far more impacted than i by the painful realities i’ve named, can feel, can heal, and create freely, in, (so long as we remain attuned and alert,) the deepest, uncoopted sense of that word. i, in particular, want to thank Anjali Nath Upadhyay, whose participation in a Decarcerating Care panel brought me to IDHA, and whose political analysis helps keep me alert to the contradictions within non-profit spaces, to sun and Jessie for creating such warm, inviting, gracious spaces, and to the incredible care lineages IDHA platforms and builds with, including fellow members that help make IDHA spaces as accessible, nourishing and life-altering as they are, especially my often non-verbal kin lighting up the IDHA chats with so much rich call-in, care, commentary, resources, and indulgent emoji love.