Walk/Move Listen Make: Kwinitekw/Connecticut River Valley, PROJECT LAUNCHES JANUARY 2022

“Walk/Move[1] Listen Make: Kwinitekw/Connecticut River Valley” invites inhabitants of the Kwinitekw River watershed to walk with the Land.[2] “Walk/Move Listen Make” is a community co-creation and deep listening project to attune us to our beloved Land, Water and all our “environmental kin.”[3] We invite the community to walk-move together to restore reciprocal, consensual and sustaining relationships with each other, with Land and our watershed. What can we learn by journeying together, listening deeply to each other and our other-than-human kin? What can we heal by reconnecting with sacred Land? How can we walk/move towards climate justice, collective resilience, Land reparations and Indigenous self-determination?

The artist, JuPong Lin, invites neighbors, family, friends and residents of the Kwinitekw Valley to walk/move and make art and poetry together. Walking scores or instructions will be offered, as well as deep listening and attunement workshops, to guide journeys (scroll down for sample scores). Field recordings will be made of the voices, stories and songs of the two-legged, four-legged, winged, and rooted critters. SoundWalks will be composed from recordings and made into podcasts for others to listen to while journeying. An ecoart installation will be created from art, poetry, and stories of walkers/movers.

I acknowledge the Land where I live and work is the unceded territory of the Nipmuc, who since time immemorial, have cared for it. I also acknowledge our Indigenous neighbors, the Abenaki to the North, the Wampanoag to the East, the Mohegan and the Pequot to the South, the Mohican to the West. I hold myself accountable to Indigenous communities who insist that settlers must act beyond land acknowledgement to repair the harm of colonization, genocide and dispossession of Land. The project intends to uplift stories of Indigenous Peoples and descendants of enslaved people, in solidarity with BIPOC’s (Black Indigenous and People of Color) struggles for reparations and #Landback.

Contact JuPong Lin at jlin@antioch.edu if you are interested in participating in the project.

[1] “Walk-move” draws attention to accessibility and those who travel by wheelchair.

[2] Sandra Styres writes Land with a capital L to reflect Indigenous relationship with Land. “Land is spiritual, emotional, and relational; Land is experiential, (re)membered, and storied;…—Land is sentient.” Sandra Styres, “Literacies of Land,” in Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View, 2018, 27.

[3] Zoe Todd and AM Kanngieser, Listening: An Invocation (CTM FESTIVAL, 2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGe0DYMroEg.

Walk/Move Sample Scores

Sample score for an hour-long trail walk/move:

1.      Choose a special or sacred place to walk/move together.

2.     Begin by acknowledging the Indigenous People on whose land we walk-move.

3.     Visit with each other and catch up on your lives (20-30 minutes).

4.     Decide how you’d like to walk in silence (e.g. as slowly as you can, one person with eyes closed, etc.) Walk in silence for a few minutes.

5.     Reflect on the questions below (during the walk or soon afterwards):

a.     What did you hear or sense or feel?

b.     Did you notice changes since the last time you walked here?

c.     What are your hopes for the future of this Land? What feelings arise with this question?

d.     What do you need to prepare for climate catastrophe? What does our community need?

e.     How do you think you can help others prepare for climate catastrophe?

f.      Can our community offer gifts or help to victims of environmental and climate injustice?

Sample score for a town walk:

1.      Choose a place to walk/move together, a path or road you travel daily.

2.     Begin by acknowledging the Indigenous People on whose land we walk/move.

3.     Before you walk/move, learn what you can about the history of the place.

4.     Go for a walk/move. Visit with, catch up on your lives (15-10 minutes).

5.     Listen to a recording of an Indigenous story of this Land; or an immigrant story.

6.     Decide how you’d like to walk in silence (e.g. as slowly as you can, one person with eyes closed, etc.) Walk in silence for 10 minutes.

7.     Reflect on the questions below (during the walk or soon afterwards):

a.     What did you hear or sense?

b.     How did listening to the stories land in your body?

c.     What are your hopes for the future of this Land? What feelings arise with this question?

d.     What do you need to prepare for climate catastrophe? What does our community need?

e.     How do you think you can help others prepare for climate catastrophe?

f.      Can our community offer gifts or help to victims of environmental and climate injustice?

This project is part of JuPong Lin’s dissertation research undertaken in pursuit of the Environmental Studies PhD at Antioch University New England.

An Intersectional Ecojustice: Attuning Beyond Our Physical Bodies

It was such a pleasure and honor to offer the keynote presentation in the Undergraduate Program on August 28. Here is the recording of the presentation: An Intersectional Ecojustice. Deep gratitude to Muriel Shockley for inviting me, Riley Monthy and Michael Lemarsh for their help gathering branches and mounting the installation. More photographs to follow.

Poetics of Repair: Being Earth, Being Water at the Haybarn Gallery, Goddard College, August 2021-January 2022

Horseshoe crab folding at LAVA in Greenfield

Last weekend’s retreat was thoroughly enjoyable. The intimacy of the space opens up the creative juices and helps the small group connect. This was my first hybrid workshop, with two people joining us on-line. Everybody was able to do at least some of the folds, and some beautiful writing emerged.

May Reverie

Dark soil full of wet worms
winding around roots, thin and thick
My body, my blood sinks into the cradle
of Earth, at home as the sprawling comfrey,
baby corn stalks squash seedlings bean sprouts
At home, my bones belong here, to this place
this month, heart sings, eyes sting
Mouth waters with the juice of eating
feeding living
Scents of May tickle my nose hairs
Lungs burst with fresh oak and lilac breath

This Saturday I found one lonely horseshoe crab at the Wellfleet beach, and a few shells for the next project.

Poetics of Repair closed, Reopening at LAVA Center in Greenfield for May

Poetics of Repair: Being Earth, Being Water closed on April 22 at the Augusta Savage Gallery, but videos of each workshop can be viewed in the online gallery. I’m filled with gratitude for everyone who joined me in co-creating this space of contemplating climate catastrophe. And I’m thrilled to announce the installation will be hosted by the Local Access for Valley Arts (LAVA) Center in Greenfield.

I introduced each workshop with a call for renaming what is happening right now from “climate change”—sort of innocuous-sounding words lacking urgency—to the more accurately descriptive words, “climate catastrophe.” What is happening now is catastrophe—catastrophic loss of life, loss of our beloved places, catastrophic destruction of homes and displacement of millions of climate refugees. The world needs our collective attention; yet many of us in the less vulnerable places of Turtle Island are trying to avert our eyes, to shield ourselves from experiencing “climate trauma,” as ecopsychologist, Ziwha Woodbury calls it. Many authors of essays in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis speak into this wall of resistance and denial of what is really happening, the denial that keeps us from collective awakening to our interbeing with our Earth and each other, two-legged, four-legged, winged and rooted. The Poetics of Repair project creates spaces for public expression of feelings that climate catastrophe arouses, for grieving in community, feeling anxiety and distress together. Along with the many ecojustice warriors in All We Can Save and on the frontlines of climate justice, Woodbury proposes that climate trauma is triggering or exacerbating other forms of collective trauma, specifically cultural traumas such as colonialism, genocide and ecocide.

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel talks about these forms of oppression as “a distortion of our true nature.” I want to link Manuel’s teachings on oppression to the question of what is needed to awaken to climate catastrophe.

Oppression disconnects us from the earth and from each other. Awakening from the distortion of oppression begins with tenderness: we recognize our own wounded tenderness, which develops into the tenderness of vulnerability and culminates in the tenderness that comes with heartfelt and authentic liberation. That first experience with tenderness is a cry from deep within our own nature it compels us to seek out a connection to the Earth and each other.

—Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender

Woodbury believes that connecting personal trauma to collective trauma and climate trauma—”making climate trauma personal”— has the potential to unleash the transformative, mass movement needed for climate trauma “recovery.” I am not sure “recovery” from climate trauma is possible; but I do think reparative work is necessary—reparations for Black and Indigenous people displaced from their sacred places, and repairing the intergenerational violence of white supremacy—if we are to heal and move collective trauma to collective action.

In my workshops, I share practices of deep listening, poetics and paperfolding, and story circle to create spaces for us to seek the “tenderness that comes with authentic liberation.” It will take a lot of practice to undo the intersecting forms of oppression imposed on us, forms of oppression that, when internalized, become knives cutting us apart from our own bodies and selves. The presencing practices and critical making practices that have sustained me have evolved over a lifetime of co-learning and study. I offer them with the hopes that you will also find refuge in these practices.

Welcome to Poetics of Repair at the LAVA Center. I invite you to join me in May and June on the continuing journey of awakening to climate catastrophe. Come inside and sit with the cranes, canoes, and horseshoe crabs; write or make some paper creatures, or just sit with your feelings. If you wish to contribute to the installation, you can leave what you write or make below this sign, and I will integrate them when I visit. I will offer a live and virtual workshop on May 15, 2:00-5:00pm EST, with the first hour for paperfolding lessons, and the second half for guided meditation, poetry reading and writing.

Cranes, canoes and butterflies on the left contributed by community participants.

Installation in progress at LAVA. Mica Lin-Alves on the left, assisting JuPong on the right.

Poetics of Repair Opening Friday

The final touches are made, horseshoe crabs and seeds placed, poems recorded. There’s still time to register and request joss paper if you’d like to fold with me. Click this link: Poetics of Repair at Augusta Savage Gallery. Please note that the paper request is separate from event registration. Register for each individual workshop you wish to attend.

Schedule of April Workshops (4:00pm EST)

April 2 Theme: Self-care in the face of eco-anxiety, eco-grief. Learn canoe fold through canoe poems.  

April 9 Theme: Our People, communities, collective care. Learn crane fold through the poem, “1000 Gifts of Decolonial Love” 

April 16 Theme: Interspecies being. Learn horseshoe crab fold to the poem, “This Arthropod Loves a Full Moon.”

April 22 Theme: We are Earth. Learn globe fold.

Help Fold Cranes

Poetics of Repair: Being Earth. Being Water is now open to the University of Massachusetts community at the Augusta Savage Gallery in the New Africa Building, Tuesdays - Thursdays 2:00-5:00 pm. The space can accommodate two visitors at a time. Timed tickets can be reserved here: Augusta Savage Gallery Tickets. The online workshops in April are open to the public.

There are 2,700 cranes hanging in the space. I hope to fill in the space on the left with 900 more for a total of 3,600, in honor of the Siberian Cranes alive in the world today. You can contribute to the cranes by registering for paper and instructions here: Poetics of Repair at Augusta Savage Gallery. You can also purchase your own joss paper (see note below). Please mail folded cranes to the following address:

Women of Color Leadership Network, 180 Infirmary Way, Room 127, Amherst, MA 01003.

Note about paper** Cranes and horseshoe crabs need to be folded with square sheets of paper. The joss paper supplied is not exactly square, but I have trimmed it square. If you acquire joss paper from your own source, it needs to be trimmed about half an inch to make it square.

Poetics of Repair at Augusta Savage Gallery UMass, April 2 2021

Creating this contemplative space for ecojustice with folded paper elements gives me such joy. I have made about a hundred paper canoes, 2000 cranes and a handful of horseshoe crabs. If you’d like to help fold elements for the installation, you can request paper on the event webpage here: Poetics of Repair at Augusta Savage Gallery

Here is an excerpt of one of the poems I will perform on April 2, 9, and 16.

This Arthropod Loves a Full Moon, August 2020

Poetics of Repair: help fold prayers for lives at risk

The lives of billions of people living in places already too hot for human habitation hinge on the actions of wealthy nations like ours to drawdown on greenhouse gasses immediately. The lives of 4000 Siberian Cranes hang by a thread, threatened by human destruction of their habitat. All life on earth is threatened by the toxic blend of capitalism, colonialism, and anthropogenic climate change that has ravaged our earth-home. The pandemic has added another layer to the challenge of connection. Horseshoe crabs are bled for biomedical testing to develop vaccines. Poetics of Repair invites participants to make medicine together, to fold sacred objects for our ancestors (of all species), to mend relationships with our beloved kin and our Mother Earth. The series of poems incorporates instructions for folding cranes and canoes, a practice that can awaken each of us to our interbeing with earth, sky, flora and fauna. As we fold, we become more and more connected with what we make together, until the boundary between our “self” and what we make dissolves. We are, and have always been, co-creating each other and our pluriverses. If we could all awaken to this reality—that caring of individual self is the same as caring for “other” beings, we might collectively put an end to the devastation of climate change, and co-arise as a multi-species whole. Poetics of Repair is a participatory installation that concoct a medicine of decolonial love to mend our ravaged world.

JuPong will offer a live, on-line workshop and community performance on the first three Fridays in April (in solidarity with Fridays for Future: https://fridaysforfuture.org/) that includes a guided meditation, poetry reading and paperfolding lesson. Those interested in contributing paper cranes, canoes and/or horseshoe crabs for the installation may purchase joss paper* at Tran’s World Food Market in Hadley, and mail or drop off folded objects to be incorporated in the installation. Updates on the development of the installation can be viewed on JuPong’s website at www.juponglin.net. On Earth Day, April 22, 2021, JuPong will host a virtual tour of the co-created installation and a Story Circle and discussion about climate justice. 

*Canoes can be folded with the joss paper as is, slightly rectangular shape. Cranes need to start with a square sheet. You may need to trim an edge of the sheets of paper to make them square.

Teachings of Canoe

These poems and paper-folding instructions invite you to learn to fold canoes and contribute them to an installation for Earth Day at the Augusta Savage Gallery in April 2021. The canoes are made with joss paper or spirit money, ceremonially burned to honor the ancestors in Taiwan.

With gratitude for the Blue Heron Canoe Family, Michael Evans, Skipper and Chair of Snohomish

Poetics of Repair in process

Poetics of Repair: Becoming Earth, Becoming Water

JuPong’s workshop is part of a socially-engaged art project that revitalizes earth-centered traditions for resilient futures. The workshop opens with a guided meditation on joss paper—the plants, minerals and human labor that created the paper. Joss paper in Taoist traditions is traditionally burned as part of ceremonies to honor ancestors. Also called spirit money or hell money, the bamboo paper is folded in half or into the shape of a gold ingot, and then burned, along with other paper objects. Burning the paper transfers the value to the ancestors realm where they re-materialize. JuPong will teach participants how to fold cranes and canoes, invoking the cultural somatic memory of paperfolding craft. Participants can contribute the folded objects to JuPong’s art installation, Poetics of Repair: Returning to Earth, scheduled for exhibition in April 2021 at the Augusta Savage Gallery. The paper will be burned in honor of our most ancient ancestor, the Earth herself.

Recording of Performance

Recording of Workshop

Poetics of Repair/Reparations

The “Poetics of Repair” emerged in the weeks just before the novel coronavirus turned into a pandemic and forced a global lockdown, bringing travel to a veritable halt. I teach interdisciplinary arts at Goddard College, and we had just begun to create a relationship with the Snohomish and the Blue Heron Canoe family in the months before the pandemic. We were planning to travel to S’Klallam land, Port Townsend for our March residency and looking forward to learn the teachings of the Blue Heron Canoe family. Instead we had to put our residency online. Videoconferencing did allow us to connect with Michael didahalqid Evans, Chair of the Snohomish Indian Tribe and father of the Blue Heron Canoe Family, and Karen Condos, President of Natives United in Journey. We learned how the Tribal Canoe Journey has revitalized the Indigenous nations who have participated on this sacred journey. The canoe is much more than simply a vessel for water travel. Canoe culture is Indigenous Resurgence, ceremony, and healing, sacred knowledge. Robin Sigo, MSW, is Director of the Suquamish Research & Strategic Development Department and a co-investigator of the Healing the Canoe project. Using Community-Based/Tribally-Based Participatory Research (CBPR/TPR) model, the project connected Suquamish and Port Gamble S’Klallam youth with elders to revitalize culture as an essential component of reducing substance abuse and building individual and community resilience. Canoe culture and Indigenous resurgence are vital to Indigenous people’s survivance, in the face of ecological crisis, ongoing colonization, and now pandemic.

Every living being on earth will suffer the consequences of the threats of petro-capitalism, colonialism, and climate catastrophe. Every community will need to grieve the tremendous losses of kin, both human and other-than-human kin, and to bolster personal and collective resilience. I believe settlers urgently need to listen to and learn from Indigenous peoples who have survived multiple periods of climate change and over four centuries of colonial oppression. As an immigrant settler living on stolen land in a town named after a genocidal colonizer, I lean very cautiously towards learning from Indigenous peoples, knowing it is all too easy for settlers to perpetuate extractivist patterns of taking, taking, taking, without giving back. I am trying to walk respectfully alongside my Snohomish friends, deepening the relationships that have just begun. I learn alongside my teachers, and “speak nearby,” as Trinh T. Minh-ha has taught. “Poetics of Repair” is dedicated to the First Peoples of this land, and to the next seven generations, my future kin.

The participatory performance presents instructions for folding paper canoes, cranes and horseshoe crabs through poetry. We fold as an act of repair, as a gesture of respect for Indigenous knowledge and ancient water ways of our peoples. I fold paper in a ceremony of repairing the generations of violence and dispossession that settler societies have wrought on Indigenous peoples around the world.

Canoe, kayak, rowboat, dinghy, barge, ferry, skiff, raft, frigate, yacht, gondola, sailboat, freighter, houseboat, steamship, flagship, yawl…lifeboat. Each of these words conjures up water vessels with different functions—from leisure to transport to rescue. In a time of shrinking glaciers, rising oceans, wildfires and superstorms, we need stories and practices of survivance and survival.

This workshop invites all to our stories, our grief, rage, despair, and fear. And then we find joy in making beauty together. Participants can contribute canoes, cranes and horseshoe crabs to the installation scheduled to open at the Augusta Savage Gallery in April 2021.

Florence Poetry Carnival, May 9, 2020

I’m curating an interdisciplinary art space for the Florence Poetry Carnival this May. FloPoCarn 2020 will feature poetry games, a poetry carnival barker, flanerie, edible and foldable poetry. “Poetics of Repair” was inspired by my emergent relationship with a Snohomish elder, Michael Evans, who built a canoe with his father that they named the Blue Heron Canoe. The Blue Heron Canoe Family has traveled on many Tribal Canoe Journey (an annual, sacred journey of Indigenous cultural revival in the Pacific Northwest for several decades. Last fall a poem about a canoe came to me in a dream; my home was flooded to the second floor, trapping my sons and I in a room with one small window. Just as the water was rising over our knees, I looked out the window and saw a yellow canoe floating towards the window. We climbed out the window into the canoe to safety. This spring, it was as if the dream came to life. Our student and friend, Juan Carlos Valdez, put us in touch with Michael and learned that he wanted to bring the canoe to the Goddard College MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts residency. I believe that paddling together is a way we can repair our relationships with each other, settler and Indigenous, human and beyond-human beings, and between humans and our beloved earth/sky/oceans.

I’m seeking collaborators who feel called to this work of the “Poetics of Repair”.

Instructions for Being Water: a Performance Score

Composed by JuPong Lin and Devora Neumark PhD, co-founders of Fierce Bellies Collective[1].

“Instructions for Being Water: A Performance Score” was initiated just as a team of climate scientists issued a warning that humanity has only three years to dramatically lower greenhouse emissions “or face the prospect of dangerous global warming." We developed this score as “entire ecosystems” were “already beginning to collapse, summer sea ice was disappearing in the Arctic and coral reefs were dying from the heat.” In our desire to contribute to a radical alternative to the widespread eclipse of the truth about interconnectivity, we – the Fierce Bellies collective – lean towards each other and again outward. We invite new kinships and invoke ways of living and being to counter the current patterns of self-/destruction. We propose instructions for being water, instructions rooted in holistic thinking and oneness, in alignment with Jewish Kabbalistic, Chinese and Taiwanese traditions.

To date, we have enacted the score twice during the Goddard College MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program's residencies in Plainfield, VT (July 2017) and Port Townsend, WA (2017).

The Vermont version can be accessed here:

Instructions for Being Water, Plainfield, VT

The Washington version can be accessed here:

Instructions for Being Water in Port Townsend, WA, at Soak on the Sound.

Finding Our Village Voice

Wicked Questions (WQ) Feast Mankato - is a creative intervention led by artist/facilitators JuPong Lin (Providence, RI) and Teresa Konechne (Minneapolis) and is the beginnings of a global movement to weave together our stories, questions and actions around climate change. Ju-Pong and Teresa will help us unearth both our personal and collective stories through facilitated conversation, storytelling, and the process of finding our own wicked question. Then we will bring our energy, passion and questions into an afternoon of collective creativity through song, poetry and visual art. This is one of the first WQ Feasts to happen and will be a model for other communities around the world.

Come!! Be part of a dynamic event that will help you find your voice around climate change and become part of a global project! Video sketch of 1000 Wicked Questions: www.vimeo.com/111552773

"Watery Edginess..."

Ju-Pong will be presenting “Watery Edginess in the Films of Tsai Mingliang,” on the Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism panel at the 45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at Susquehanna University, April 3-6, 2014.

Environmental Film Series at the Columbus Theater in Providence RI

Ju-Pong is working with the Apeiron Institute for Sustainable Living (http://www.apeiron.org/new/index/) to curate a series of film salons at the Columbus Theater in Providence Rhode Island. Films intended to raise awareness about environmental concerns will be shown, followed by discussions facilitated by Ju-Pong. Watch for announcements about the screening dates.