Join me for an intimate and experiential evening of art, listening, connection, and reflection.

As first and second-generation migrants, one of the primary points of resistance to our queerness within our families comes from the idea that queerness is a Western phenomenon and not a part of our ancestral cultures. LAKOU SEKRÈ // SAKRE was an altar to this experience, and an invitation to witness el secret abierto, or ‘the open secret’ in action. In this iteration of my work, I invite queer and trans migrants, our friends, and our families to move from witnessing to participation ~ now that the secret is out in the open, how do we want to be in conversation with it?

GATHERING is an experience in three parts, approaching oral history as a social and cultural practice, amplifying the stories of QTGNC migrants, and honoring the practices that made LAKOU SEKRÈ // SAKRE possible.

Join me for an intimate and experiential evening of art, listening, connection, and reflection. Come to move slowly through the ritual of gathering.

This event is part of a year-long series: Keeping Memory: Oral History Practices that Host Kin and Community. A keep is a place to hold what is both precious and intimate. In the oral history practices featured in this series, kin memories are held in trust, in wisdom, in ritual, in heritage, and in each other. These projects think beyond the one-to-one interview encounter, gathering the embodied experience of kin, families, and communities. Each asks what needs to be remembered, and who needs to remember.

This series is curated by Nyssa Chow and hosted in partnership with two institutes of community memory: this fall at Weeksville Heritage Center in Central Brooklyn, a historic site preserving one of the largest free Black communities in pre–Civil War America; and this spring at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, a Puerto Rican and Latinx cultural home on the Lower East Side.

About Laurie Zamí Germain

Laurie ‘Zamí’ Germain is a Haitian-made, African-grown, Brooklyn-based, cultural [&] memory worker. With their collaborators, they explore questions around queer diasporic experience under the intention of [remembering] [imagining] pathways towards personal and collective liberations. As a writer and artist, they know that their most honest & impactful work, at its core, is also a study of self. As an oral historian, they work with the oral history encounter and the archive generated from it as prompts for creative reflection through their installation practice.

Laurie is a 2023 OHMA Future Voices Fellow, and a 2024-2025 Artist in Residence with Haiti Cultural Exchange. Their Oral History collection “A Queer Haitian Renaissance” can be listened to via the Haitian Studies Institute Archives at Brooklyn College starting Winter 2026. Zami can be found writing under a tree or by the water, in the archives at various cultural institutions in NYC, and on Instagram @secondgenders.