Writing Diasporic Dreams and Futures with CAO Collective
Saturday, December 20, 3–5pm ET / 12–2 PT over Zoom
Free; register here
Join us in the deep of December as we welcome Chinese Artists & Organizers (CAO) Collective to lead a virtual writing workshop on dreams, nostalgia, and diasporic home-making. What alternative knowledges, homes, and futures can we access through dreaming and writing together? How do dreams and nostalgia open up a portal for future-making, in connection with our own bodies and the bodies of land, water, and time? Join CAO Collective’s huiyin zhou and Laura Dudu for a virtual session on dreaming as a relational method and collective writing practice. Participants are invited to share bedtime stories, dreams, and reflect on their relationships to home/land, rest and sleep. Through somatic practice, guided writing activities and facilitated conversations, participants are invited to weave a collective dreamscape for resistance and healing.
Please ensure stable access to the internet and writing tools such as journals, pens, and online collaborative documents. This event will be facilitated in English but participants are encouraged to write/doodle/create in whatever languages they feel called to.
The stories co-created in this workshop will be included in CAO Collective’s long-term social practice project, “One Thousand and One Nights: A Queer Journey of Dreams & Diaspora”, culminating in a collective dream archive. This event is presented as an invitation to deepen into Olivia Ong Evans’ upcoming film Kota Hujan (City of Rain) on December 5. This event is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and Teiger Foundation.
About the artists
hú-tu (Laura 嘟嘟 & huiyin zhou) is an artist duo with backgrounds in social practice and anthropology, working across moving image, photography, performance, and collaborative writing. Dedicated to multidisciplinary art and transnational organizing, huiyin and Laura co-founded and co-direct the Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草.
About CAO Collective
Founded in 2022, CAO Collective creates art to empower relational community healing. Their works investigate systems of discipline, control, censorship, and capitalist extraction and reimagine memory/memorials, rituals, intimacy, and queer/feminist kinship to (re)build sustainable community infrastructures. caocollective.com / @caocollective
