All Levels Welcome! Song Song (Parallel Play) opens as a playground in which the participants are invited to reconnect with their senses via photography. In this workshop, photography will be re-introduced as a balance between its intimacy and detachment, of pre-mediation and immediacy, of fun/action and stillness/strangeness through practices (but more like play). Participants will be able to take prints home.

In Vietnamese, song means "at the same time" or "parallel." It goes with what the workshop is about: creating art/working alongside someone else. In math, song song means they are always at the same time, on the same length, but never meet. A connection. This workshop may bring us all the way back to when we were kids, to when we were able to play alongside someone without even knowing their name.

Nu (they/them) is a photographer/exhibition producer. They co-founded Vănguard zine and Chaosdowntown Cháo art space to promote the art of Vietnamese artists. Their vision is to maintain the diverse discourse on the subject of art and mental health. They actively work on various ways to promote healing within the Vietnamese diaspora. Their photography is spontaneous and intimate, to the interpretations of your own.

Growing up in Việt immigrant households, Anh Thư and Matte saw their families struggle to get by. Anh Thư internalized that asking for help is shameful and bothers the person who was asked. Matte coped by becoming hyper-independent and struggled to accept care. Your relationship with asking for help and receiving care might be more complicated if you are disabled, grew up in an immigrant household, experience poverty, or have any intersections. Explore asking for help with us. Learn to believe that you deserve love and care.

Matte (they/them) is an artist of any medium they can get their hands on. These days, they're drawing a genderqueer comic, building bikes, and running TransFits with Anh Thư. They are a child of a Viet immigrant and an adoptee. They are learning to listen to and live through their body.

Anh Thu (he/him) sees into souls and helps them realize their deepest needs and desires. He has created and led workshops from intro to improv to collar making with laser engravers. He's currently thrift shopping for queer and trans folks' euphoria, making earrings, and building furniture.

This workshop will guide QTAPI participants in exploring community care through the acts of embodied imagining and writing. We will access our creativity and intuition as pathways into imagining new ways, or remembering ancestral ways, to nurture and support those we are in community with—and receive nurturing and support ourselves. Prompts and exercises will include optional and accessible somatic and breath work as well as Tarot and oracle deck work. No previous writing experience needed. Participants are encouraged to bring a deck if they have one, as well as an item that represents care to them for the community altar we will build together.

PLEASE RSVP HERE

Saturday, August 19, 2023 1:00 PM -  3:00 PM ET

The Metropolitan Community Room, 38 Oak St, Boston, MA 02111

The incentive of Narratives of Transformative Love practice/workshop(s) is to amplify inner-healing by identifying & breaking down internalized oppression to recreate a positive and authentic self-image. We believe in using art and writing to address past wounds/traumas, judgements, negative criticisms, and societal expectations in order to heal and transform our identity to reflect our strengths and develop radical self-love & forgiveness. Using various (QT)BIPoC-centered ancestral roots, we took to the arts to help heal ourselves and our community by changing the negative narratives created by others to redefine us for us. We shift away from the white-supremacity standard of normalcy and embrace our true inner selves to build a sense of solidarity in community and create advocacy for our communal needs. We aim to empower people by giving them a voice to articulate their true identities in their own words and visions in order to create a personal and institutional change.

Thursday, August 17, 2023 6:00 -  8:00 PM ET

The Metropolitan Community Room, 38 Oak St, Boston, MA 02111

RSVP HERE

(w/ Prema Bangera!)

Prema Bangera, who is ethnically South Indian (from Tulu Nadu) of lower caste, born in Mumbai, and partially raised on the unceded land of the Wampanoag and Massachusett people (so-called Boston), is a multidisciplinary artist, a community organizer, a cultural worker, educator, and an editor. She has 15+ years of experience working in the community with a trauma informed lens.  She is also the Mixed Genre Editor for Midway Journal. Her writing and artwork has appeared in various publications and showcased at the Boston City Hall and painted on the streets of the unceded Naumkeag lands (so-called Salem, MA) as part of the Raining Project at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. 

She had founded & was the executive director of a grassroots nonprofit organization called Teen Voices Emerging, geared towards empowering female-identifying and non-binary youth through using their voice & words. Bangera has launched a consulting community organization called Healing Empowers Ancestral Love (H.E.A.L) which offers three program, where one is an established healing-arts program called Narratives of Transformative Love aimed to uplift (QT)BIPoC community members by addressing systemic oppression by reclaiming their own identities using arts as a catalyst. Narratives of Transformative Love workshops have been facilitated for youth and adults in various venues, students in Boston Public Schools, educators at the Summer Teachers Institute in Boston University, and at organizations and schools in Kenya and India. Bangera was selected by the Boston Women's Fund in partnership with the Boston Foundation for their 2022 Women of Color Leadership Circle. 

Bangera is a global Yoga Alliance & Indian Government certified advanced yoga instructor (RYS-500)  and studied yogic philosophy, physical movement, and holistic ayurveda nutrition. Bangera is passionate about raising awareness on decolonized & debramahized yoga practices. She also studied classical Indian dance (Bharatanatyam), along with modern, hip-hop, and jazz dance. She is also part of the Red Sage Stories playback theatre troupe, a BIPoC theatre group using arts as a catalyst for social change. Bangera has been a teaching artist & writer at the Institute of Contemporary Art & the United South End Settlements.

Follow her work-in-progress Instagram via @premapaintspoetry