unfolding projects

1000 Gifts of Decolonial Love

This project began as a poem inspired by a dream of Sadako's mother, and is an evolving, multi-faceted community performance and epic instructional poem that continues to evolve in different iterations. The poem embeds instructions for folding paper cranes; the story of Sadako, Hiroshima victim whose paper cranes came to symbolize peace; a story of “climate colonialism” and the endangerment of cranes in Taiwan; and contemporary liberation struggles of Indigenous Resurgence and M4BL.

The first video poem was screened at the Decolonizing Nature conference in April 2017 at the University of New Mexico. It was part of a performance and workshop for the virtual Northfield Authors and Artists Festival 2020. The poem was published in Issue #11 of Dark Matter Women Witnessing, along with a couple of other poems.

Link to recorded performance/workshop, Augusta Savage Gallery, April 2020

Link to recorded workshop, Authors and Artists, June 2020

Poetics of Repair

“Poetics of Repair: Being Earth, Being Water” emerged from the “1000 Gifts of Decolonial Love” poem. “Poetics of Repair” is a participatory installation of poetry, paper cranes and canoes, concocting a medicine of decolonial love to mend our ravaged world.

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 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 harmed by colonialism, relationships with our beloved kin and our Mother Earth.

Instructions for Being Water

“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.